Today’s visit with Julia Jacquette was an all around amazing experience. I expected nothing less… After our brief tour of the exhibit on Monday morning, I immediately fell in love with her style of painting and play, and I knew that having the opportunity to chat with her would provide interesting context and information.

I particularly enjoyed Julia’s comments on her two large murals. She described the larger frames of work they were taken from — a J.Crew magazine spread and an ad for some sort of beach resort. She explained how each mural is simply a zoomed in “piece” of the larger advertisements. This context makes the abstraction all the more interesting, as someone in our class pointed out, it could critique the already “abstract” world of advertising. Personally, her close attention to the behavior of water and her way of depicting the colors of the water was my favorite part. She drew the water in a way that shows each color broken down to its exact location. The greens and whites of the water are separated out from the blues, making it it a hypnotic mixture of shapes.

Julia’s open mindedness to our interpretations of the two pieces was inspiring to witness. While it is not the larger lesson that I learned from our visit today, I did walk away from the discussion feeling empowered to search for little intricacies and details in all areas of art and life. Sometimes it is the tiniest, most obscure feature that can be the most beautiful.