Julie Beauchemin Mirrors

My practice is grounded in abstract painting as a form of narrative construction. I approach painting as a language system, where mark-making functions as syntax and movement across the surface reveals relationships between space, time, and gesture. Through layered processes of application, erasure, and accumulation, my work navigates between intuition and deliberateness, order and disruption.

Working primarily with mixed media on canvas, I employ acrylic paint, oil pastels, spray paint, inks, and unconventional materials. These elements are applied through dense, tactile passages and thin, diluted washes, allowing the history of the process to remain visible. While the work may initially suggest immediacy or spontaneity, it is guided by sustained attention to composition, colour, rhythm, and material interaction.

My paintings draw from street-based mark-making, narrative painting, and art-historical conventions, positioning these references within a single visual field. I am interested in how gestures associated with immediacy and informality can coexist with formal painterly structure. Acts of scratching, wiping, and reworking are integral to the process, introducing cycles of destruction and reconstruction that guide each painting toward resolution.

By working with multiple media and defragmenting established conventions, my practice proposes a metalinguistic approach to painting—one that embraces contradiction, physical presence, and the visibility of process as essential components of meaning.

Mirrors serves as a conceptual lens for this body of work, extending beyond literal reflection to consider how experience, perception, emotion, and interaction are mirrored through the act of painting. The works emphasize response as a central principle, where gestures unfold in relation to prior marks and material conditions, much like the effects of our interactions on one another. Through layered material processes, the paintings trace the imprint of response and presence, while serving as records of moments in time.