2121 Wards Road, Lynchburg, Virginia 24502, United States
Expressionism reborn
Seeking to Express The Tangible Inner-world Transformations of the Born-Again Experience.
The abstract expressionist art movement of the 40s and 50s of the last century, typically associated with artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem De Kooning, captured the immediate and innermost expressions of the artists through painting. This painting style allowed the artists to explore their inner emotional world and experiences and pursue immediate, gestural artistic expressions and responses to the perceivable impulses of the human heart, mind, and spirit.
This bold and passionate artistic genre became the vehicle for my own artistic pursuits as a man once lost in darkness and depravity. My transformed inner world experience, having been born again from above, was not some intellectual assent to a religious creed, but a series of transformational experiences that happened when all alone, whether on a mountain in Southern Spain or alone in a room studying the Bible.
These dramatic and life-changing God encounters affected every aspect of my life and has continued to do so over the last three decades. The time came when my artistic gifts and my faith experience would converge to produce reborn expressionistic paintings that reflected my inner world mode of being.
This artistic technique would also continue to develop from my abstract expressionist paintings into post-impressionistic paintings that would reflect my love and awe of the natural world. Meditating on nature, I came to faith in God, having previously been an atheist. Through my art I speak of that Light.
Nature compels me, driving me to its presence and arresting my attention. These wonders of creation then find their place in my heart as I ponder their magnificence, perfection, and beauty. Once filled with the imagery, off I go with the natural impression seeared within, into my studio to express that overwhelming awe and wonder through large, colorful, bold expressionistic paintings that attempt to express the ineffable.
I am Julian Raven.
