Bio
Julie Durkin Marty makes paintings that map two places at once — the deep sea and outer space — emotional states rendered in light and pigment. Her paintings are built from poured pigment and seawater, pulled across the surface in long sweeps and disrupted by sanding — surfaces that are stratified and fluid, matte and luminous, holding light from within. A recurring arc moves through the work like a breaking wave, a rainbow, a gravitational pull. These paintings translate the climate crisis into hope — Bubblegum Ocean, Marshmallow Sea — with a dark humor that is entirely intentional.
Extending the conversation of Color Field painting inward rather than toward transcendence, her practice is rooted in feminine agency — work that moves into the body, the psyche, the specific experience of living inside the climate crisis. The sea is not only subject but material — seawater enters the paintings directly, the color drawn from living creatures, bioluminescence, and scientific imaging.
Durkin Marty lives and works in Connecticut. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Mana Contemporary, 63 Audubon at Yale University, DADA POST USA & Berlin, Holland Tunnel, G-Town Arts, GBG Gallery, Mulry Fine Art, and CoLAB Arts, and has been featured in the Hartford Art Pages, Artist Magazine, the New York Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Palm Beach Daily News. She is a two-time resident of the Pollinator Platform residency.
Artist Statement
My paintings are built from poured pigment pulled across the surface of panels in long sweeps, then disrupted by sanding, compressing the surface while opening it inward — until what remains is something stratified and fluid, matte and luminous, the path the paint traveled mapped into the surface. From a distance they read as atmospheric color fields: electric blues dissolving into deep magenta, phosphorescent cyan burning against violet and near-black, with a recurring arc moving through the picture plane like a breaking wave or a gravitational pull. Up close, disrupted layers reveal themselves like windows into the painting’s history — time oscillating back and forth within the same plane. These paintings translate the climate crisis into hope — a reminder that the wonder is still there, and that we have the tools to protect it if we act.
The surface draws the viewer in — soft and matte, it reads like gouache but is acrylic, where scientific imaging connects to emotional interior, portal to map, data to feeling. The eye enters through color that backlights the paintings from within, beginning to move in a circular motion, pulled steadily inward toward the center, following the path the paint mapped. At the edges things slow down. Then the details arrive: moments of cartographic specificity, branching forms that recall neural pathways or the dendritic structures through which memory and sensation travel — places where one system bleeds into another. Wonder is the point of entry.
The titles work the same way — Bubblegum Ocean, Marshmallow Sea — a dark humor born from grief, an acknowledgment that we live in a world where synthetic material could become its own species, quietly and permanently remaking everything — including us. Once inside the work, something larger opens: the wonder of what lies beyond human reach — the unmapped seafloor, the vast dark of deep space.
My practice extends that tension into the conversation of Color Field painting — Frankenthaler, Louis, Olitski — but where they moved toward transcendence, the work moves inward: into the body, the psyche, the specific experience of living inside the climate crisis. The paintings speak to that: their color drawn from the sea itself — its living creatures, its bioluminescence, its scientific imaging — the sea not only subject but material, seawater carried into the surface alongside the pigment — surfaces built to hold loss. Sanding removes as extreme weather does, erasing while leaving its mark. Made by a woman and a mother who loves this planet and is not ready to let it go.
Making is how I stay inside all of it — the pouring, the sweeping, the sanding, the slow revelation of what the surface holds — in conversation with the wonder of the natural world. The marks are embedded with hope. Making has always been how women hold the world together.
