The Hollow Sea l  a series of paintings by Julia Schwartz  2011

 Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas. (Arshile Gorky)

Julia Schwartz is a Los Angeles-based artist whose recent paintings could be called neo- or millennial abstractions. Historically abstract painting has been acknowledged for its formal engagement with the paint itself. However, the unconscious also played an important role. This new form of abstraction is not necessarily a quest for something unknown as much as it is a inquiry into beauty or possibly enlightenment--a more conscious abstraction, you could say. The colors are expressive, like those of abstract representational painter Georgia O'Keeffe or hard-edge painter Helen Lundeberg, evoking a wider range of emotions. Happiness and joy seem to merge with our hopes and fears. Schwartz's work reflects a painter's desire to see her own feelings expressed back on herself. 

For her ongoing series The Hollow Sea, which was inspired by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan of March 2011, Schwartz explores what it is "to be an island" metaphorically, geographically and emotionally. The first works in the series were smaller landscapes or studies of islands, which developed into larger mappings, where islands become metaphors for isolation in the landscape, and the horizon line becomes a compass.

Three paintings from this series were recently selected by a blind jury of renowned curators for the upcoming Pacific Coast exhibition Issue No 97 of New American Paintings. Schwartz was one of forty painters chosen from five states and over one thousand applicants. 

Over thirty paintings are currently available for exhibition. They can be viewed HERE.
land VII, hissing of summer lawns, 2011
oil on canvas, 36x 40 inches
ice III, always open windows, 2011
oil on canvas, 48x48 inches
land XIII, as far as eyes can see, 2011
oil on canvas, 12x12 inches
land XI, submerge 2011
oil on canvas, 12x12 inches
ARTIST STATEMENT

I have something like a virtual Rolodex in my mind which contains not names and numbers, but years of study, reading, looking, shadows, dreams, art and world events. Like a receptacle of experiences, my unconscious unfurls into a painting in the same way described by chaos theory, with one small seemingly unrelated movement having an impact on the piece as a whole. 
In this series of paintings called The Hollow Sea, I have brought pieces of writing into my studio, to use as a starting point for exploration:
Ice immobile in a hollow sea melts no more
The first images I painted were abstracted icebergs, which became more bone and flesh, and then underwent further disintegration and disarticulation. As always it's an evolutionary process, where initial mark making creates a conversation that I have with the canvas and the information in my mind. It is not a literal dialogue but more of a visceral or nonlinguistic response to the image as it is being formed. There is a great continuity between my practice as an analyst and the work I do as an artist. Both deal with unconscious influences that affect the way we live and interact. What I attempt to do in this series is to visually fabricate some of those influences.

Julia Schwartz, 2011
 
portrait with the other, 2011, oil on canvas, 16" X 20"
Julia Schwartz is a practicing psychoanalyst who has been painting, largely self taught, since 2005.  She lives and works in Santa Monica, California.