Venvi Art Gallery is pleased to present In a Vivid Light, Plein Air Paintings by Julie Bowland, a solo exhibition of paintings by former Tallahassee artist Julie Bowland. Bowland lived and worked in the Tallahassee art community for twenty-five years before moving to Valdosta, Georgia where she is a professor of art at Valdosta State University (VSU) and directs the VSU Dedo Maranville Fine Arts Gallery.
In a Vivid Light will showcase new oil paintings of Bowland’s vibrantly colorful, thickly-textured landscapes. Bowland paints directly from the landscape, known in French as plein air or “open air” painting. Color is heightened and exaggerated; loose, energetic brushstrokes create bold, expressionistic interpretations of nature.
For the first time in the Tallahassee area, Bowland will also be exhibiting her mixed media works on paper, known as the Kayak Dairies because she paints them from her kayak while paddling the regions beautiful rivers, coastlines, marshes and lakes. Playful and spontaneous, the Kayak Dairies are loose, colorful, impressions of well-known local waterways like the Wacissa, the Suwannee, the Alapaha, the Withlacoochee, the Santa Fe, the Ichetucknee, and the related springs. Georgia is represented by Banks Lake and Reed Bingham Lake, as well as the Little River and the Withlacoochee River.  These watercolors and mixed media depictions of nature are light and airy, in contrast to the thickly textured oil paintings. Together they show a rare interpretation of nature in a vivid light.

Bowland says of her process, “Color is everything to me: It expresses intensity of emotion as it defines space and form. It is exciting and inspiring to slather paint while engulfed in a wild swamp or forest, to dance with the elements of wind, wildlife, shifting light, and all the other uncontrollable aspects of nature. This joy and excitement drives me to make art.  I think of my style of art as plein air expressionism, mixing direct representation of the energy of landscape with unbridled emotion.”

Bowland earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at FSU, and Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University. She formerly taught at both FSU and TCC, and was Director of the 621 Gallery, as well as the Arts in Public Places Director for the Tallahassee/Leon County Cultural Resources Commission, now Council on Culture & Arts (COCA.) In the last several years she has presented solo exhibitions at the Buchanan Museum of Art in Michigan; University of Mobile (Alabama;) Albany (Georgia) Arts Council, Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia; North Florida Community College in Madison; the Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts in Valdosta; and at the Art & Design Society in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. Her work has been shown in Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts, Lodz, Poland, and in juried and group shows in North Carolina, Louisiana, Indiana, Utah, Georgia and Florida. Her paintings are in the collections of the Buchanan (Michigan) Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Sciences (Daytona Beach,) City of Tallahassee, Florida State College at Jacksonville, and many private offices and residences. Bowland also leads plein air painting workshops for adults and children.