Julie Higgins
Artist

"My work has a symbolic nature deeply rooted in the places I have lived. I was born in Kansas and received a BFA in painting and sculpture from the University of Kansas; the heartland landscape and its organic forms made strong impressions on me. My time spent in the fertile Skagit Valley in Washington State further influenced my compositions and my current locale on the Mendocino Coast continues to inspire me to illustrate symbolically this sensual environment.

"I work primarily with soft pastels due to their vibrant color and tactile quality. The process is very intuitive, with color, form, imagery, and symbols often leading from one to the next, producing a series of works with ongoing similar themes. Pastels give me the sense of sculpting as I work on paper blending colors with my fingers, molding and giving shape to forms. I love working with the figure, and particularly the female figure, because to me it is the most familiar and interesting in terms of shape, volume, and similarity to the landscape. The act of creating for me is often like a meditation and place to focus allowing for deep feeling and emotion to arise and then translate into image.

"The main themes in my work are based around healing, celebration of love and life, using figures set in a rich landscape with ravens and the luscious fruits that echo the areas' own fertile harvests. Ravens are protector figures, sometimes humorous and other times serious, influenced by the mythology of the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest.

"My work is a constant process of storytelling and pushing through the mundane of life into the magic, and the imaginary, which connects me to my sense of nature and how I belong or fit in. It is feeling, emotion, and play set in an ever-nurturing landscape with sensual form and lots of color. Joe and I found common themes in our work and so decided to present them together—words and images arising from the heart."

Higgins currently lives on the Mendocino coast of northern California where she continues to express her participation in the feast of life through images as a symbolic language. She hangs several much anticipated shows annually throughout wine country and is honored to be the Artist in Residence at Sondra Bernstein's restaurant, the girl and the fig, in Sonoma, California. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums as well as many alternative venues and can be found in private collections nationwide.