Julie Engelmann--How to Purchase an Artwork

MFA Thesis Exhibition: Context

Julie Bernstein
June 13, 1989

I come into a world where people have broken hearts, and scramble for some portion of their dreams. We barely have time to survive, much less help the planet and ourselves recover our health and vision of what we could be.

Much to our credit, we do know the value of a key – an inspiration from outside our daily mode of survival.

The abstract expressionists, who formed one side of my early ideals, uncovered a key which rocked the world and people's lives. This key was "living in the moment," and it produced artwork so exciting that seeing the unexpected is an aesthetic standard we will never lose sight of again.

Going backwards in time, the Surrealists and Dada laid the foundation for the unconscious to speak to man from the dark side of his mind. Fishing in the dark, these groups nevertheless validated serious use of uncontrollable chance, unfathomable dreams, and unspeakable syntheses.

One strain of surreal vision spread like syrup into the lives and imagination of normal people. This was the vision of fantastic worlds and a landscape far beyond our own. Here the other side of my early ideals was built, on a frontier of dreams and contemplative visions.

I feel we are just barely surviving not because the truth is so hard to find, but because we want everything except to see it, here before our eyes.

My work is about survival as a spiritual being in this world.

"Reaching/Home" shows an inaccessible goal resting peacefully in the arms of the very comfort that is sought.

But more than a demonstration, I want my work to evoke and validate a mood of spiritual survival, an atmosphere of surprise, mystery, attentiveness, privacy, and flexibility of mind.

At Columbia I studied with Milton Resnick, the great abstract expressionist. If he taught me anything, it was to see the beauty of paint itself and what it did. Gradually my reverence for paint submerged my will to put upon it anything of conscious making.

Yet, the path of unconsciousness is a dead end: a dialog is needed. The conscious, willful mind must marry its own surrender, and set up house, and build a life together of close companionship in every project.

At UCLA my paint turned to earth, out of which finally rose the figure again, like a phoenix. I realized I had to impose upon formless substance in order to take the next step to communicate. I chose to impose upon it visions just emerging from my own subconscious, which to me explained facets of the workings of life.

Such explanations have been made before. Blake, for one, showed how the spiritual worlds worked, but who can grasp it unless they have already stepped through their own window? Blake's work and mine, medieval altarpieces and countless other attempts were metaphorical illustrations useful to few.

I come to the studio on many levels. I want to incorporate the image and the object, both modes of visual experience and communication. The most important thing I learned at UCLA was to believe in my visions and my revisions. The parts of ourselves – the comfort and binding, the questing and bonding – must be on speaking terms. Using different elements and images, I try to remind the individual that he is free.