Artist’s Statement

Drawing

Most often, to develop a drawing I improvise: I might begin with a recognizable form, but from there, one stroke propels me to a second stroke, another stroke follows as a response to the one before, and on and on, intuitive responses to that first stroke. The paper, cold pressed, with its ridges and valleys holds the information for the drawing’s final composition. The graphite sits on top of the rough surface, the softer pencil leaving more graphite behind, the harder pencil creating a shinier surface with less texture. The intricate pencil strokes, begin to remind me of deeply held thoughts and ideas, while the surface of the drawing begins to ask for depth, possibly colour, edges, and weight, all contributing to a final composition.

The drawing surface eventually takes on the look of something old, well-handled, even archaic-an artifact. We know through science that our experiences can be stored in our DNA. Perhaps, an ancestor’s  experience stored in my DNA colours my own life with a sense of that long-ago life. As the drawing expands so does the awareness of how these experiences are playing out in the drawing. A word or phrase usually begins to repeat in my mind and might ultimately become the name of the work. These words almost always relate back to the same few ideas- traces of genetic memories, myths, mapping the  subtle awareness of identity and experience before  they are concretely known. The drawings become a means to identify what is hidden in an everyday life, that sense of mystery perhaps we as human beings feel, but cannot see.

Painting

A painting may have a more concrete beginning but progresses as with drawing in an improvisational way-one stroke building on the next, one color placed in multiple places throughout the painting, testing itself beside another color. The impulse and map for creating the painting is always the same, as with drawing, “ traces of genetic memories, myths, mapping the  subtle awareness of identity and experience before  they are concretely known.” My impulse is to create “life” and movement in a painting. Paintings, then, generally, have a sense of rhythm and movement intuitively embedded in the work. While a painting might begin as more representational or figurative this usually disappears as the painting progresses, as the painting asks for more than its beginnings.

Biography

Juliette Daley has a BA in Englsih Literature, and the course work for an MA in English Literature. She has an MA in Fine Art, and an MFA in visual art and has been a professor of visual and performing arts. Daley was a competitive gymnast on Canada’s National team and concurrently was an All-American in the United States where she also won the Outstanding Graduating Gymnast Award in the US. Her acute and long standing awareness and relationship with movement and rhythm as a gymnast probably influenced her work as a painter.

Daley was active as a painter in Canada where her work is held in The New Brunswick Art Bank. She had solo shows in Canada in the National Exhibition Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick and in National Exhibition Centre, Explorations Gallery, Fredericton, as well as in Gallery Connection, Fredericton, and in the University of New Brunswick. She later moved to the US and with two children to raise her focus became on a form of improvisation dance movement theater that she developed. It was possible to bring a small child into a dance studio, when painting in the same kind of circumstances was very difficult. Her work as a visual artist was delayed until recently when she built a studio in her back yard, picked up her visual art career, and seriously pursues painting, with occasional forays into drawing. In the United States her work appeared in the group curated exhibition, Line. shown in Art 52, Fairfield Iowa, Blandon Memorial Art Museum, Fort Dodge, Iowa, and the solo exhibition, “From The Northern Kingdom”, of her paintings in Charles City Art Center.