"I enjoy associating humor with darkness, the uncanny and the mundane, grotesque shapes to vivid colors…"
—Julie Curtiss

Painted in 2016, Three Widows epitomizes Julie Curtiss’ psychologically driven paintings that explore femininity and the uncanny through a stylized, surrealist lens. Three veiled figures are spotlighted against a flat blue background in a tightly cropped compositional frame with an uncanny cinematic quality. Though turned away from the viewer, Curtiss anthropomorphizes the figures’ hair and backs, engendering an enigmatic puzzle as to the figures’ true orientation. Showcasing the artist’s signature rope-like tresses of hair, erotic suggestions, and concealed faces, the present work is emblematic of the hallmarks which have come to characterize Curtiss’ celebrated oeuvre.

 

"I avoided working overall complex compositions and instead cropped my subjects very intimately, leaving a lot of the action outside the frame. I wanted to convey a bit of a cinematic feel, and it ended up almost surreal."
—Julie Curtiss 

From 18^th- and 19^th-century French painting to the Chicago Imagists’ dreamlike graphic imagery, Curtiss draws upon a vast range of art historical influences in her practice. In the present work, she culls a fusion of artists who she has noted as specific inspirations—the illustrative quality of Christina Ramberg’s surrealist-pop female figures, Édouard Manet’s portraits of Berthe Morisot in mourning, Gustave Courbet’s well-known Burial at Ornans, and René Magritte’s leitmotif of obscuring the countenance. Filtering these evocations for her own painterly agenda, Curtiss explains in her artist statement, “My artworks are psychological....I like to depict...objects that evoke a domestic, tamed image of women. On the other side, organic, ambiguous body parts allude to a darker archetype of a woman fused with nature. Through faceless portraits of women, I want to reflect on identity, as it is defined by nature and culture, and as something that is ever-changing.”ⁱ

  

Having moved to Tokyo in 2006, when she began developing a more graphic, comic book-like aesthetic, Curtiss later moved to New York, where she solidified her signature mode of painting. “My art went through a new phase a few years after I settled in New York,” Curtiss elucidated.ⁱⁱ “My art became lighter and more in phase with new life challenges: affirming myself as a woman, embracing the multiple facets within myself, engaging more with the outer world.”ⁱⁱⁱ Her propensity to present elements in twos or threes at once reflects her aim to “extend the body through objects, forms, and figures” and present the various shades of self through “[exploring] the ideas of dreams, parallel worlds, and synchronicity.”^iv

 

Heightening this allusion while challenging the very nature of a portrait, the facelessness of the figures is the device through which Curtiss channels the personal to embody the universal. “My work is deeply personal....My figures are a mixture of personal experiences, of projection, archetypes, borrowed elements and observations,” she explained.^v “These portraits are almost self-portraits, but without the face you don’t actually know. They are all forms of portraits, just without the face. Anyone can project into them.”^vi

 

"Hair itself is amorphous, but you can shape it; it's inert and alive at once....What I like about hair in painting is the pattern and repetitiveness, which is hypnotic and attractive."
—Julie Curtiss 

 

ⁱ Julie Curtiss, former artist statement, Dialogist, vol. 4, issue no. 3, 2019.
ⁱⁱ Julie Curtiss, quoted in Marie Zemtsova, “Piecing the Puzzle in Julie Curtiss’ Paintings,” Art Maze Mag, February 15, 2019, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
^iv Julie Curtiss, quoted in “Julie Curtiss,” Work in Progress, June 2017, online.
^v Julie Curtiss, quoted in Marie Zemtsova, “Piecing the Puzzle in Julie Curtiss’ Paintings,” Art Maze Mag, February 15, 2019, online.
^vi Julie Curtiss, quoted in “Julie Curtiss,” Work in Progress, June 2017, online.
^vii Julie Curtiss, quoted in Evan Pricco, “Julie Curtiss: Where The Wild Things Are,” Juxtapoz, April 15, 2019, online.
^viii Julie Curtiss, quoted in Emily Burns, “Q&A with Julie Curtiss,” Maake Magazine, 2017, online.