Born to a painting mother and piano playing father, Julia Ciaccio has had art flowing through her veins for her entire life. Chicago has been Julia’s artistic playground since her early years beginning with trips to the Art Institute. Obsessed with Vincent Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters and Manet’s Fish Still Life, the surface quality of paint and saturated colors have always been a concentration in her own work. Being aware of the urban landscape and her love affair with the city, Julia decided to explore the countryside and relocated to Iowa to study painting at the University of Iowa. The geography and scenery of the cornfields and farms became a huge influence and is where she learned the art of abstraction. Feeling like an alien in a new world abstraction was the best way Julia felt she could express herself. Always being very personally and privately centered her painting went through a metamorphic stage in Iowa that she has been running with ever since. Returning to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute completing post baccalaureate work Julia has been consistently working in lieu of color theory and materials.

Julia Ciaccio’s theme song is comprised of a whole lot of noise. Colors, materials and process are the instruments, and are sometimes harmonious, and sometimes out of tune. Pulled from observations and personal moments in everyday life, colors represent something privately seen and experienced in the world: Sour chartreuse colored candy, plastic Mardi Gras beads, Red and yellow does not make purple, the Music Box marquee, and Belmont is next, suburban debutantes, faux hawks and mohawks, my anti cat named Picabia, Museum shortcuts by Arp’s Torso Kore, the new movement of hard core women abstractionists, conversations about fashion with a lumberjack, metro sexual poster boys, the Coltrane anthem on Tuesday, maybe yellow is sad today, snake skin heels and brown velvet pants, the grays of Lake Michigan on a cloudy day, the color of a lover’s eyes, Iowa cornfields. Using color theory as the guide, Julia chooses colors not only based on their emotional connections, but also their neighboring relationship to one another. The result being a pleasing painting in formal and aesthetic viewing terms.