Julie Pate - Artist Statement

Painting with nail polish is my play and meditation.

Even when a line ends it should look as if it had plenty of capacity for more growth, everything is ever so intricately connected and growing. 1

Constantly unwinding, it is a never-ending process. Nail polish painting is painting within the Petri dish. The surfaces in which cells are created exist within the paint of nail polish and rest upon the surfaces. It is the surfaces that are most intriguing.2

The relationship of light in transparent color is one of an infinite delight, and the igniting of the colors, the blending of them one into another, their rebirth, and their vanishing is like the breath being drawn at great pauses from eternity to eternity, from the highest light down to the lonely and eternal silence that lies in the deepest tones.

Objects are cloaked with a charm that lies in the illumination of the air between the object and us and in the lighting of its forms.3 The treasure is in the luminescent packaging and the light which allows the iridescent colors of all kinds to become visible. Light and knowledge are so intimately intertwined, interwoven into the fabric of our universe, our language and our understanding. Those lacking insight are usually considered “in the dark”. I am interested in being “in the light” of the eternal moment, where every moment is infinite. Eternity lies in the moment, in the ‘present’ moment.

“In visual art the Aesthetic moment is that flitting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at. He ceases to be his ordinary self, and the picture, the landscape or aesthetic actuality is no longer outside himself. The two become one entity; time and space are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one awareness. When he recovers a workaday consciousness it is as if he had been initiated into illuminating, exalting, formative mysteries. In short, the aesthetic moment is a moment of mystic vision.” - Bernard Berenson.

The practice of spiritual contemplation or meditation bears a striking resemblance to experiencing a work of art. It is to forget oneself and to see clearly. The capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to loose oneself in perception, is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our wiling, and our aims and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject the clear eye of the world. This is the context within I wish to create work, to experience work and to be in the world and the studio. In order for the viewer of a work of art to fully appreciate the experience they must be open minded to the possibilities, which are endless.

Both art and meditation depend on this.


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1 “Rational Growth is necessary to all patterns or at least the hint of such growth; and in recurring patterns. At least, the noblest are those where one thing grows visibly and necessarily from another.” – William Morris

2 In her book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, English Botanist and photographer Ann Atkins I was inspired by how recorded a ghostly host of spindly forms clearly indebted of visual form as “organic truth”. She wrote "Tentative spirals in a Petri dish that could serve as a primer in romantic notions of formal perfection and symmetrical growth- it is the surfaces that are most intriguing."

3 What Color is the Sacred, Michael Taussig