Julia Takahashi

(Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States)

Biography – Biographie

Julia Takahashi started her artistic career as a ceramicist, became a practicing architect and is now working in oil, collage, mixed media and sculpture.  She is a Happa with a Japanese father and a mother from an old New England family.  This background in the context of American race relations provided her with a strong grounding in the power of being a bridge between cultures. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado and now lives in the Nambe River Valley north of Santa Fe, New Mexico where she has her studio.  She has an undergraduate degree in Environmental Design and a Masters in Architecture and Urban Design.  She took some art courses during her academic years, but most of her training has been through apprenticeship, mentorship, non-accredited classes and her own study and practice.

Julia Takahashi débute sa carrière artistique comme céramiste, est devenue architecte et travaille maintenant à la peinture à l’huile, au collage, aux techniques mixtes et à la sculpture. Elle est une Happa, dont le père est japonais et la mère est issue d’une vieille famille de la Nouvelle-Angleterre. Ce parcours dans le contexte des relations interraciales américaines lui a permis d’acquérir une solide base dans le pouvoir d’être un pont entre les cultures. Elle a grandi à Boulder, dans le Colorado, et vit maintenant dans la vallée de la rivière Nambe, au nord de Santa Fe, au Nouveau-Mexique, où elle a son atelier. Elle est titulaire d’un diplôme de premier cycle en design environnemental et d’un master en architecture et en design urbain. Elle a suivi quelques cours d’art pendant ses années universitaires, mais la plupart de sa formation s’est faite par l’apprentissage, le mentorat, des cours non accrédités et sa propre étude et pratique.

Artist’s Statement

The Kintaro Series

The Kintaro Series is an exploration of the Japanese aesthetic concept of Yūgen through the expression of my feelings and memories of, Kintaro, a yellow Labrador Retriever and hiking companion.

Yūgen is a sense of mystery in beauty. It is an interplay between the phenomenal or lived world and the suggestive feeling or lingering memory of that world. It engages our imagination with the use of empty space, simplification, asymmetry and irregularity. For the artist, yūgen becomes a dialog between the feelings of the artist, the image, and the feelings of the viewer. The experience is subtle and profound. Understanding comes from winnowing out what is not depicted, for the story is left mostly untold and the viewer finds meaning in their own emotional reaction.

In these paintings, I explore my increasingly ephemeral memories of Kintaro and the poignancy of my feelings of loss but also the happiness he exuded. Subtle abstraction allowed for the use of color to capture emotion and gestural strokes of dry pigment on wet paint to express movement and Kintaro’s joie de vivre.