Solomon Fine Art is delighted to host an exhibition of new paintings by Julie Cusack, her first solo exhibition with the gallery.  Julie studied Visual Education in the Waterford Institute of Technology and subsequently received a National Diploma in Art & Design from the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology in 2003.   Now living and working in Kilkenny, she has exhibited  extensively throughout Ireland including at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, Eigse, Carlow and the Royal Hibernian Academy.

This body of work was born out of Cusack’s desire to make paintings that reflect the theatre of landscape and its many elements.  Julie’s abstracted landscapes are vibrant, layered and have always been rooted in drawing.  Working primarily on paper and board she combines paint with drawn elements as drawing for her is not only a way to represent object or place but is also a way to engage in the intuitive physicality of making marks on a surface.  Starting with an image sometimes, from memory, sometimes from observation, she layers paint and graphite on board or paper and begins the process of editing. Some areas become obscured or recede while others push forward and what evolves is a dance between surface and depth, between what is random and what is particular.  Ultimately Julie endeavours to create abstracted compositions which represent a fictional place between the external and the internal.

Cusack has been a practising artist for the last 16 years and her work is represented in the OPW State Art Collection and in private collections in the UK, US, New Zealand and Portugal. She joined the Solomon Gallery stable in 2014.