Marie Julou Paintings

     Marie Julou is the painting pseudonym for Tina McCallan:

     Marie: her middle name and Julou her mother´s maiden name. Mostly painted on amateur canvasses her work is a tongue in cheek attempt to re-connect with her French ancestry: think easel painting in Montmartre, Berets and Bohemia. Marie’s work seeks to undermine the occasional pomposity of oil painting by using bright candy colours and most recently the colour pink.

    Long associated with women, Marie seeks to re-appropriate the almost forbidden colour and uses it to make a variety of paintings some of which which have their roots in formalism, others in process painting and others in Outsider Art. Ultimately concerned with the materiality of the medium and the process of mark making itself as a way of saying, “I exist”, the paint is the subject itself expressed either through drips, staining or creating thick blobs of oil.

    Fascinated by the haptic process of painting, that is to say, how time seems to slow down during the act of making a work as well as viewing it, coupled with the desire to create a unique visual experience for the viewer, these works are an antidote to a screen dominated society and the obsession with displays of pictorial skill in Art.

    Since graduating from the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Kunstakadamie Dusseldorf, Marie has always painted but started using Installations and Performances as a way of expanding the rectangle of the canvas. In 1999 she made her first re-creation, a collaborative project where she invited 77 people to re-create the, “Arnolfini Marriage”, by Jan Van Eyck, this has become a practice in itself under the name of Tina Re-creations and she has been commissioned to organise projects in museums and institutions such as the National Gallery, London, the United nations Lebanon and the Museo de Belles Artes, Valencia. See www.tinamccallan.com for more info.