Julie Himel, “Awe Struck”

by Matthew Kangas

Foster/White Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Continuing through December 20, 2025

Julie Himel, “Glitch,” 2025, oil on board, 12 x 12”. All images courtesy of the artist and Foster/White Gallery.

Canadian artist Julie Himel presents four paintings measuring at around 4 feet in tandem with nine small oil and mixed-media paintings in her current show, “Awe Struck.” The works obliquely tackle the current issues of climate change, but from the safe, time-honored Canadian tradition of landscape, a heritage dating back at least to the Group of Seven painters of the 1920s and 30s who addressed specific regional locales from all across the dominion. Himel confronts and challenges her predecessors’ devotion to pastoral themes and fetching geographical identity.

Julie Himel, “Your Heart Was a Goldmine,” 2025, mixed media on canvas, 30 x 30”.

By tightly focusing on specific vistas in the tiny canvases, the artist draws us into an intimate encounter with the image, executed with vigorous i

mpasto and palette knives, slashing color and emphasis on diagonal trails and riverbeds or, as she puts it, “experiences of rupture.”

That rupture is cosseted by bright colors, often within one hue per painting, such as the pink in “Glitch” (all works are 2025). Downplaying the variety of colors in nature, each image — from a sunset to a swooshing pond — could be the product of a polluted chemical after-spill of mining. Once one grants the vivid colors a sinister register, the pictures take on a deeper content beyond their masterful decorative and soothing qualities. For instance, “Your Heart Was a Goldmine” posits a poisonous sky above a ravaged ravine with tall trees that appear shorn of leaves and branches, and in “The Future is a Moment” red lightning streaks through a darkened sky. These paintings convey the exhibition title of “Awe Struck” to the extent that they jolt us simultaneously into a conventional appreciation of landscape painting and the discomfiting state of nature gone wrong.

Julie Himel, “The Future is a Moment,” 2025, mixed media on canvas, 12 x 12”.

Himel’s vigorous gestural brushwork is evident throughout, and provides a large part of the exhibit’s appeal. Going beyond the harmonious celebrations of nature associated with the Group of Seven, she annexes the current moment of planetary decay and the battles between natural wonder and industrial harvesting of nature through mining and timber, an even bigger national issue in Canada than in the U.S.

Julie Himel, “She Remembered Blue,” 2025, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 48”.

All of this is perhaps too heavy a rhetorical load for Himel’s elegant slabs of paint with their contrasting grounds and skies. However, the urgency of the artist’s brushwork could symbolize the clock ticking on public access to underfunded national parks and provincial land preserves encroached upon by mega-corporate landowners eager to expand their purview. In this sense, Himel’s claim that she “seeks to capture that collision — where perception is pierced and the veil of apathy is torn” is the quiet revelation of the exhibition.

That said, the four larger works are overshadowed by the memory of somewhat larger works from Himel’s prior exhibition. These expanded the sense of grandeur and vista through aggressively expressive paint-handling and abbreviated compositions. In “She Remembered Blue,” a rising mountain in the background is lost in a blue afternoon shade with a yellow and green foreground of shrubbery and stubble. That vista is flipped in the forlorn grandeur of “Edges Sweetly,” with its high vertical drama of sunset in all shades of pink and smudged black and blue foreground at its base, like a glistening oil slick or muddy pond.

Julie Himel, “Edges Sweetly,” 2025, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 40”.

With these two works, Himel convincingly joins a global cohort of artists re-inventing landscape in light of global warming. The artist’s challenge now is to emphasize such real-world dangers while retaining her brilliant powers of assertive execution and chromatic experimentation.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.