Midterm

Julie Mehretu

"Trying to figure out who I am and my work is trying to understand systems,” says Julie Mehretu, while working with her assistants in Berlin on seven large canvases for a show. “The thing that keeps me going is the painting,” she says, “and in getting lost in doing that a language is invented.” Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian born visual artist, was raised in Michigan. She and her partner both share a studio and discuss on both of their works.She has another studio in New York.

Drawing and printmaking are primary activities for her. I feel like her abstract arts are drawn in new ways which have challenging questions for the viewers. There are huge scales paintings in her studio. Few of them were eight by eleven feet or ten by fourteen. One of her biggest project that she is working on is 21 by 85 foot long. At the beginning of her interview she says, "I’m not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark."

After observing her paintings what I understand is that her paintings have layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint.So many marks, curve, multiple forms, lines, rapidly expanding spaces. Small dots and squares, straight and curving lines, her paintings have fragments and movements as well. The predominant shape of her painting is geometric.

In most of her paintings she uses abstracted images of cities, histories, wars, google map and geographical form such as charts, building plans and city maps and architectural renderings. She said to bring her characters into contexts of time and space he began to include architectural plans and historical drawings to create metaphor in paintings.

In the studio she is working on few paintings at the same time. A painting, Julie is working on represents view of a city from the google map. As these paintings have huge scale whenever she finishes, her assistants do their works on those paintings one of them was working on the surfaces of a painting; sprays it with a clear silica-and-acrylic solution, in order to smooth the painting. While working that assistant was saying, they can be any scale Julie can print on them. After finishing any painting with stretchers they have to move those in order to send to New York.

At last I would say her work is successful because her paintings are beautiful. She gives her intense engagement on her work. Her paintings are interconnected and complex. Through her abstract work she presents difficult conditions as metaphor that could be political, war related or cultural. This video makes me think differently about the way artists work because I have never seen before artists working on paintings having huge scales and staring at them day after day in order to get new directions and implied meanings.