Julie Keaten-Reed

As a child growing up in Wyoming, Julie’s favorite refuge was the quiet expanse of the landscape. After spending 35 years absorbing the scenery around her, she found ways to express her visions. A five-year stay in Japan marked the tipping point when Julie picked up a brush and began to paint her world. Her works, both on paper and canvas, use traditional sumi ink and either watercolor or oil paint for color accents. Her method allows her to use an ancient brush-and-ink style and bend it with her mind and desires. Julie has taken an ancient Asian painting technique, filtered it through her exposure to so many different modern and European genres and created a body of work that marries contemporary Western sensibility with traditional Eastern minimalism. A credit to Julie’s artistry is her ability to not paint, to stop before the image fully emerges. She instead allows viewers to enter each piece, adding their own embellishments and completing their own stories.