Rereading / Without the Use of Walls

"In my paintings of fictional spaces, I combine strangely coloured landscapes with architectural interiors, placing the viewer simultaneously inside and outside, on the threshold of imagination and reality. Visual ideas begin with descriptions in novels, yet my images are emptied of characters and story. Painted stage sets for absent players, my work suggests the possibility of narrative without providing resolution.
Saturated colour and transparent paint creates a quality of light that recalls the glow of the screen or the translucency of memory. A large scale format allows me to paint multiple rooms, multiple entrances and exits, windows into landscape and doorways out of the canvas that allow the viewer to visually inhabit painted space. The paintings are made from a miscellany of image sources: my own photos, old interior decor books, postcards, National Geographic magazines and images off the internet. Image fragments suggest simultaneous realities: creative space, imagined place, how memory screens over the present."

Julie Beugin, December 2008