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Joanne Julian is an Armenian/American artist. She is best known for her reductive style and often have a Zen quality identified in her work. Her artwork calls our attention to the beauty and transcendence of the natural world that surrounds us. Julian attributes her attention to precision in lace creation and tailoring to her Armenian heritage. For over 30 years, Julian has been renowned for her mastery of both detailed drawings and spontaneous calligraphic brushwork, as well as her unique mixed media works that blend two styles. She received her BA and MA in sculpture and printmaking at California State University, Northridge, and her MFA in sculpture and printmaking from the Otis Art Institute of Parson School of Design.

Early Life
During her early life, Julian was raised by traditional, first-generation Armenian parents in the San Fernando Valley. During the Armenian Genocide, her grandparents from both her paternal and maternal sides fled to the United States for refuge. In her small modest family, there was a plethora of proper discipline and focus, with the major expectations emphasizing hard work, high scores, good conduct, and basic manners. Julian attended public schools and paid her University tuition by teaching for the City of Los Angeles and working as a clerical assistant at California State University, Northridge. She earned two BAs and an MA in five years, aiming to have the financial means to support herself as a studio artist by teaching classes. In the end, she secured enough money during the following five years of teaching at the College of the Canyons to attend Otis Art Institute.

Art
Her work transitions from prints to paintings to drawings, employing Japanese approaches, including such a form of simplicity and softer strokes. Zen Circles is a series that mixes loud, emotional free brush strokes with the precise painting of traditional Japanese hair styles as well as natural elements such as water and air. Further Asian influence may be seen in paintings of gingko leaves and goldfish that start with colorful daubs or drips that are then surrounded by precise brush strokes to create images. A delicate union of natures, a merger of humans and every natural organism, of yin and yang, the discipline and spirit of Taoist painting. Critics have often noticed a Zen character in her work. Joanne Julian's works reassure the audience that drawing is a physical activity. She has almost always handled energy with grace as if she were an athlete or a dancer. Her art is dominated by a sensation of energy and motion, regardless of imagery. They are sophisticated but also forceful, dramatic as well as captivating, complicated, and reductive. They are visual, but they also have musical and dance-like elements. They vividly represent the energy that underpins all occurrences. She has exhibited all around California, and her work is extensively collected by both people and businesses. Julian has had over 60 group exhibits and 20 solo shows around the country. She frequently works on commissions for international businesses on site-specific artworks.

Career
Julian first came to know Japanese art when she traveled to the country in the late 1970s - particularly through a print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), who designed a series of prints called "One Hundred Aspects of the Moon" in the late 19th century. One of his works, "Ochiyo's Grief," depicted a woman with disheveled hair staring at the sky, her lover's love letters unrolling in a spiral up toward the moon. Julian began researching various aspects of Japanese art and aesthetics, an artistic journey that has lasted her entire career. Her interest was initially piqued by the emotion she sensed in Yoshitoshi's lines depicting Ochiyo's hair. In the 1980s, Julian began to research Japanese traditional hairstyles and went on to create two series of drawings inspired by them: "Wigs" and "Tattered Letters." In these early works, Julian's control of line and tone is very apparent in the smoothness of the hair, the volume and light effects created with her pencil. In "Tattered Letter VII," we sense emotional distress reminiscent of Yoshitoshi's heroine in the wildly knotted mass of hair, with rough graphite sketch lines accentuating the feeling of frenzy. And just as the subjects in many Japanese woodblock prints and paintings seem to float in open space, Julian's subjects often seem untethered—further intensifying their emotion. Though she freely admits that Japan influenced her work, Julian gives credit to her own heritage too. Julian's careful line work can be seen in her paintings and prints of koi fish, which she has been creating since the 1990s. In her Fish series of monoprints, she splashes paint onto the paper, then prints an image of a koi fish onto the same sheet of paper on top of the dry paint. She gives these fish volume and character with her finely detailed lines; however, she allows them to swim in the vastness of an empty ground—either plain white or bold black or delicate celadon pools. According to Buddhist principles, when fish go through water there is no end to it no matter how far they go. When birds fly in the sky there is no end to it no matter how far they fly. Yet neither fish nor birds have been separated from their element: water or sky. In Julian's works, her fish swerve gracefully through space at once representational and iconic. Zen symbolism can be seen throughout her most of her work. The themes of hair, fish, Zen circles, and birds have recurred and interacted throughout Julian's career, rendered with a graceful blend of refinement and emotion.

Exhibitions
Solo and Two Person Exhibitions:

2019 Joanne Julian: New Work, VITA Art Center, Ventura, CA    Monumentalis: Works on Paper, Garo Z. Antreasian and Joanne Julian, Tufenkian Fine Arts, Glendale, CA

2017 Joanne Julian: Defying Darkness, Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA

2015 Garden Portraits, Valley Performing Arts Center, CSUN, Northridge, CA

2008 Joanne Julian: Counterpoints, California State University Northridge, CA

Group Exhibitions:

2019 Holiday Group Show, Tufenkian Fine Arts, Glendale, CA    Rec-ol-lec-tion, VITA Art Center, Ventura, CA     Unlikely Conversations: Selections from the University Art Collection, California State University, Northridge Forest Bathing, The Loft at Liz's, Los Angeles, CA         The Imaginary: art commingling realism and imagination, Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA

2018 Visions of Elysium, Inland Empire Museum of Art, Upland, CA

2017 Soluble Power, Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA