About Julie Ressler

My curriculum vitae is a little different than others might present, I suspect. When I read biographies, I want to know “why” and if that person gained or lost by being interesting enough for anyone to want to read about that life. I am only interested in the “who, what, where, when” if it illuminates a lot of the “why”.

Home Schooling:

I lived with my grandparents and a large extended family in this wonderful house in Waterville, New York. The winters were very long, but we had many interesting visitors who came to see my grandfather from all over the world. The art, sculptures and wallpapers have been given to various museums. A few pieces are still privately held. The power of this collection still lives in my mind as a standard.

Although my mother and my grandmothers painted quite well and prolifically, my interest in art began about sixty years ago when I took a marvelous red lipstick and re-colored my grandmother’s creamy flock wallpaper. The reaction was mercurial, fury to laughter, but I remember very clearly thinking that art could really spark up a boring afternoon.

The next morning the twenty-four box of Crayola crayons and a pad of newsprint came into my world. I can still remember the waxy smell and the sight of all those points of beautiful colors. They tasted quite good actually. My interest in visual arts was kindled into a life-long devotion.

Private Schools, Charlottesville, VA:

Theater and Museum Studies, New York City: I “found” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frick and the MOMA, Carnegie Hall, the “old” Met and Broadway. I watched the Guggenheim being built. My stepfather filled the house with people whose lives were devoted to the arts and were pro-actively working their talents. I spent every spare moment wandering around, looking and talking to people, going to shows and concerts, feasting on the Arts.

BA, Pace University, New York, NY 1967 – experimental Project X- interdisciplinary studies.
Dr. John V. Walsh, Director told us,“You will not know whether your education was “good” until you are fifty or sixty.” In retrospect, nothing was lacking that I had not been taught how to find. If I wanted to learn something, I read books, took lessons and learned how to do it.

Private Lessons:

Drawing: Monserratt Barcelo
French: Alliance Francaise du New York
German: Bernard Porhorales
Piano: Edna Dagan
Spanish: eight years in the Dominican Republic

Founded Award Winning: Sinfónica Infantil de Santiago, Dominican Republic
Medalla de Oro – El Gordo de La Semana Gold medal for exceptional service to The Dominican Republic.

In the Dominican Republic, I learned that art is a universal necessity and that all art comes from the same place inside a human being. The form that expression takes either in drama, dance, music, comedy, visual arts, poetry doesn’t matter. I call it “touching the invisible.” Everyone can do it. To feel really good and whole, each person must find his way to do it without regard for anyone else’s opinion and completely disregarding their expectations.

We returned to the United States in 1988 and most of my life’s force until just a few years ago was subsumed in my five children’s activities - soccer games, piano, violin and cello lessons at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, visits to the nearest Emergency Room and the usual life activities of a suburban Mom. After the last of my gifted and talented children went to college. I began to paint again full time.

The time educating my children served me well. I thought I had sacrificed decades to my children’s development. Actually my time couldn’t have been better spent for my own growth. I kept collecting photographs and experiences. The breadth and depth of my emotional life is totally the strength of my art. By taking the children from “Beginnings” to “Completions”, I learned the lessons too. I also learned the “tortoise’s lesson,” the most valuable lesson of all. Lasting progress in the arts and in life, happens slowly, slowly, with patience and kindness, sparked only rarely with flights of imagination and sudden bursts of inspiration.

Artist Statement

To choose art is to understand things differently than other people, otherwise anyone could do it. This difference separates and isolates. What makes that aloneness worth it? Why not just be ordinary? Well, almost any of the artists I have known, myself included, look faintly puzzled or pained, amused, angry, resigned but answer uniformly and reliably, “ I just can’t do that. I have to be me. I just have to do this thing”

People tell me I have a joyous palette. I do. Color has power that is beyond understanding until you see its effects. The Fauve Landscape Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1991 was a perfect example of this transforming power. The night was bitterly cold and rainy. By some miracle we had found parking on the street and traffic had not been terrible, but we were all really uncomfortable and exasperated by the time we got rid of our coats and umbrellas. My husband, a stoic museum-goer, even at the best of times was with people he did not care for and the evening was looming into never-ending tedium for him. I could see it clearly. He was just about to not say a word.

We navigated the brackish, beige stairs to the second floor. We turned the corner. Instantly we were seized by the fabulous reds and oranges, blues and brilliant yellows, turquoise and purples that these men made into their joyous palettes that had caused them to be called wild beasts or Les Fauves in the early 1900s. Their passion grabbed our faces and kissed our eyes over and over again until we were soon gasping, “Look at that! Have you ever seen that color before?” We were pulling each other from painting to painting. Very soon, our tired faces were transformed to that special clarity of wonder and renewal of being in color.

As an artist I think that “Reality” is misunderstood. People say, “Get real!” They mean see the worst, say what’s hurtful, paint what’s ugly. Is despair more real than joy? I prefer to embrace the sunrise, smell the flowers and love my family. I believe in a vigorous life process. “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, Picasso's “Guernica” and other great works give us an awakening and a frame of reference we didn’t have before they were painted, but if a person hangs pain and misery on the walls, if those negative sensations greet even the most fleeting glance, then that becomes the awareness. If there are positive luminous images then our thoughts are refreshed. We should examine our focus. Is the glass half full or is it half empty?

View the organizations that I have supported. View photo credits.