Art Gallery Pure is one of Red Dot Miami’s 2021 Spotlight Artist Recipients.
Q: Introduce yourself — who you are and what you do?
A. Julia Ross, Director of Art Gallery Pure. I am an American abstract impressionistic painter. Inspired by meditation and nature, I use mixed media to transpose the aura of meditation to artwork and inspire a calm strength in the viewer. Layer upon layer of paint reveals an impressionistic view of seascapes and landscapes. The artwork brings the viewer to a peaceful moment in time, possibly fused with the past to translate a peaceful experience.
Q. What is your background?
A. Introduced to painting by my artist mother, with a family of poets, writers and musicians, my fondest memories involve days spent enjoying creative elements. I began painting as a young age and continued throughout childhood and teen years, which expanded to majoring in Fine Arts at The University of Texas. I ultimately pursued a professional career in advertising, to build digital brands online, continuing to feed my creative passion as an artist in multimedia, painting and sculpting.
In 2018, I opened Art Gallery Pure, LLC to represent emerging to experienced contemporary artists and provide an avenue to give back. 10% of art gallery margin benefits charity. In 2019, the company extended current efforts of promoting talented artists, opening Art Gallery Inc, to provide a platform to feature women artists and their contemporary works. The art sales continue the founding company mission to give back to charity.
Q. How do you work?
A. Everything is connected. From meditation to artwork, artists, art industry professionals and art collectors, I strive to extend positive energy via the creative universe. Art Gallery Pure works with artists who exude positive energy and we network with others in the art business who provide the same. Good energy is contagious. The aura of that energy extends to the canvas, which ultimately ends up in the environment of the art collector.
Q. What art do you most identify with?
A. As an artist, I personally identify with the Impressionists. As a gallerist, contemporary works from abstracts to figurative, oil, mixed media to collage inspire me. As an artist myself, I enjoy watching artists grow personally from emerging to Internationally collected professional artists.
Q. What artist(s) inspires you?
A. “At the Art Basel fairs (Basel, Miami, and Hong Kong), women made up less than a quarter of the artists on view over the past four years.” National Museum of Women in the Arts
Just 24% of the 27,000 artists shown at art fairs in 2018 were women. Art fair sales that year totaled $16.5 billion. The Global Art Market Report 2019 (Art Basel/UBS).
Only 29% of the winners of the Turner Prize, one of the best-known visual art awards, have been women—though several women have won over the past decade. In 2017, Lubaina Himid became the first woman of color to win. Tate list of Turner Prize winners.
I believe we know of only a fraction of the work by talented women artists. Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel is educating us of the struggles and path of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. They all inspire me to help other women artists grow their careers.
Q. What is the best advice you’ve received?
A. Listen to your angels. Trust yourself. Paint what brings you peace. Find artists who do the same. Your business will grow with the energy you extend to the universe.
Early in my art career which evolved from marketing, I began applying my knowledge of obvious supply and demand. I assumed we needed to find what collectors were buying, place it on the walls of the gallery, and they would buy… right? I quickly learned there are buyers for every work and just because something was not selling did not necessarily make it less valuable.
The value resides in the energy of the artist which extends to build value of the work to the art collector.
Q. When you are not working, where can we find you?
A. We enjoy as many days on this earth as possible around water. Travel has provided experiences to meet others and gain new perspectives on life.
