Stop by the gallery to meet the incredible artist of our current exhibition, In a Vivid Light. Artist Julie Bowland lived and worked in the Tallahassee art community for twenty-five years before moving to Valdosta, Georgia where she is a professor of art at Valdosta State University (VSU) and directs the VSU Dedo Maranville Fine Arts Gallery.
In a Vivid Light will showcase new oil paintings of Bowland’s vibrantly colorful, thickly-textured landscapes. Bowland paints directly from the landscape, known in French as plein air or “open air” painting. Color is heightened and exaggerated; loose, energetic brushstrokes create bold, expressionistic interpretations of nature.
For the first time in the Tallahassee area, Bowland will also be exhibiting her mixed media works on paper, known as the Kayak Dairies because she paints them from her kayak while paddling the regions beautiful rivers, coastlines, marshes and lakes. Playful and spontaneous, the Kayak Dairies are loose, colorful, impressions of well-known local waterways like the Wacissa, the Suwannee, the Alapaha, the Withlacoochee, the Santa Fe, the Ichetucknee, and the related springs. Georgia is represented by Banks Lake and Reed Bingham Lake, as well as the Little River and the Withlacoochee River. These watercolors and mixed media depictions of nature are light and airy, in contrast to the thickly textured oil paintings. Together they show a rare interpretation of nature in a vivid light.
