I wanted to be a stewardess until age four, and then wanted to be an artist. Born in Japan, I moved with my family to the U.S. West Coast, East Coast, and to the Midwest. I have lived in thirteen states, all suburban areas until college. Contact with nature was limited. The only family pet was a guppy in 1970.

My undergraduate degree is in design. At twenty-three, bidding farewell to high heels and an office with a red leather couch on the thirty-third floor of Rockefeller Center in NYC, I quit Time/Life and began to paint. The paintings are influenced by place: Kansas, Japan, New York, and Oregon. While the work has a personal narrative, viewers have their own interpretations. I am driven by the mysterious and the ephemeral. There is a word in the Japanese language, kehai, which is the feeling that something has just happened or is about to: a footstep, a whiff, a stirring. I attempt to make a lasting image out of kehai -- the fleeting moment.

When visiting a museum I look for pentimenti, when certain colors become transparent over time. Similar to an X-ray of a painting, pentimenti allows one to see the under-painting, for example the gesture of the hand before it was redone. Some works, like Down Dog, are quickly executed, while Roger and Janet was worked on for eleven years. Because of egg tempera’s transparent nature, change and correction are apparent in completed work. Models or photographic references are rarely used, because of a fascination with memory; specifically, that which we choose to remember and that which we choose to forget. The alterations of memory give some of the paintings a dream-like quality, though dreams are rarely used as subject matter.

Studio time is divided between narrative paintings and an ongoing ten-year project called The Last Supper. The Last Supper plates illustrate 400 final meal requests of US death row inmates. While the plates are quite different than the paintings, both are observations of contemporary society. I am driven to the studio to make some sense of our world: painting as questioning and meditation. Andy Warhol said the artist of the future will simply point. I paint to point.

Inquires: greenjulie@mac.com