Julie Bernstein Engelmann: Her Journey in Art
by Chip Engelmann
This article appeared in
Small Town Life Magazine
December 15, 2001
Volume 1 number 10
In my office across from my desk used to hang a large, captivating artwork created by my wife, Julie Bernstein Engelmann. As I write this article, the piece is part of an exhibit called “Five Voices of Vision” at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Indiana. I miss it. There is a hole where it used to be–a loss of comfort.
On the surface, it is a simple piece–a young man or woman looking down, smoothing beach sand with her foot. On close inspection, jute twine weaves through sisal strands and felt batting, painted with acrylics and something like sandy stucco. It demands that you look behind the piece to see how it is constructed. From a distance, the colors are a mixture of blues and browns–forged into a powerful image that moves your attention around, creating space and motion.
Julie sees her journey in art as “the struggle between the personal ‘indulgence’ of creating art and the universal beauty or honesty that speaks to others.” I see her art as a gateway to exploration of my inner thoughts, emotions and memories. I love my wife, and no doubt that taints my judgment, but I believe that Julie Bernstein Engelmann is one of the most creative and talented artists I know.
Julie was interested in art from an early age, learning to draw from her older sister. “We were both introverted, so we spent a lot of time together ‘competing’ in drawing. For example, I remember being about five the day she pulled out the big new gun–a new way to draw a nose. We had recently achieved the L-shaped nose, but now she drew a line down and two dots for nostrils off to one side. Darn! She always figured it out first. Of course, I couldn’t wait to copy her, and that drove her crazy, but it meant she had to go out and find a better way to draw a nose.”
Julie says her biggest influence in art was Milton Resnick, whom she studied under at Barnard College in New York City. Resnick, a friend and contemporary of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, was at the forefront of the abstract expressionist movement around the 1950's. “[Resnick] was the real article in art.
He was alive with it, and he changed my way of seeing art. I learned to see whether the parts of an image resonate together, like a hologram, matching some inner prototype that is always there in a good artwork.” Yet she learned her sense of color in a more practical way. “In New York City I worked as a textile colorist for two years after college. A colorist spends all day mixing precise colors in ink, making new combinations for fabric designs to match some theme. I thought I came into the job knowing something about color, with all my years of training, but every day I ate my humble pie learning more about color from these amazing people who worked behind the scenes in the clothing industry.” This “education,” she ventures, has at times been more valuable to her studio work than her MFA program at UCLA, from which she graduated in 1989.
Currently, in addition to her involvement with art shows, Julie has been painting sets for the Indiana Players theater group. Having to balance mothering two children, helping out at Vitamin Connection–our local store and gallery, and running an editing service, Julie does not paint as much as she would like. “ I dream about art installations, art studios, and art shows almost every night. I don’t produce nearly enough paintings to document or manifest the stages I go through, but the time I do spend is all the more sweet and productive.” What does she get out of making art? “As I work, I watch for a combination of surprising passages and coherent flow to come into focus. When it does, it’s magical–it’s my ‘raison d’etre.’ That’s real living to me.”
(c) 2001 Chip Engelmann
