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Embankment—Air Base
Artist
Julie Bozzi
(Born 1943, United States)
Date2000
MediumOil on linen
DimensionsImage: 4 × 10 in. (10.16 × 25.4 cm)
Framed: 10 3/16 × 16 3/16 × 1 7/8 in. (25.88 × 41.12 × 4.76 cm)
Framed: 10 3/16 × 16 3/16 × 1 7/8 in. (25.88 × 41.12 × 4.76 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Endowment Fund
Object number2001.2
Status
Not on viewCopyright© Julie Bozzi
Category
Label TextThe patches of land featured in Julie Bozzi’s paintings are often intuitively recognizable as areas around Fort Worth and Dallas, along the Gulf Coast, and in the eastern Piney Woods. Departing from grand, heroic landscapes, Bozzi’s imagery focuses on sites embodying ordinary intersections of culture and nature. She often selects the shrubs that camouflage man-made structures or small pockets of natural growth within urban spaces. Embankment—Airbase, 2000, depicts a landing strip and its grassy embankment.
To paint such landscapes, Bozzi sits in her car near dusk in front of her chosen site. The horizontally narrow formats of her works echo the view through her car windshield. The composition of Embankment—Airbase takes the form of three abstracted horizontal bands denoting embankment, airstrip, and sky. The dingy green grass, brownish runway, and gray sky convey the muted hues of the North Texas terrain in most seasons, along with its distinct evening light. Her scenes never show people but always incorporate elements—such as the flight strip here—that reveal human interventions.
Bozzi’s process derives from the plein air method of painting outdoors adopted in the nineteenth century by the French Realist and Impressionist artists. Like those of the Realists, Bozzi’s images relate to a photographic aesthetic, with straightforward, unsentimental portrayals.
A Texas resident since 1980, Bozzi acknowledges her attraction to the mythic aspects of the state. She is drawn to significant places in dark chapters of Texas’s more recent history: the grassy knoll in Dallas linked to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the roadside field on the outskirts of Denton where serial killer Henry Lee Lucas dumped his girlfriend’s body, the prairie near Waco where the Branch Davidian standoff ended in flames. These events occurred on nondescript patches of Texas land, any of which could be subjects for Bozzi’s painting.
To paint such landscapes, Bozzi sits in her car near dusk in front of her chosen site. The horizontally narrow formats of her works echo the view through her car windshield. The composition of Embankment—Airbase takes the form of three abstracted horizontal bands denoting embankment, airstrip, and sky. The dingy green grass, brownish runway, and gray sky convey the muted hues of the North Texas terrain in most seasons, along with its distinct evening light. Her scenes never show people but always incorporate elements—such as the flight strip here—that reveal human interventions.
Bozzi’s process derives from the plein air method of painting outdoors adopted in the nineteenth century by the French Realist and Impressionist artists. Like those of the Realists, Bozzi’s images relate to a photographic aesthetic, with straightforward, unsentimental portrayals.
A Texas resident since 1980, Bozzi acknowledges her attraction to the mythic aspects of the state. She is drawn to significant places in dark chapters of Texas’s more recent history: the grassy knoll in Dallas linked to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the roadside field on the outskirts of Denton where serial killer Henry Lee Lucas dumped his girlfriend’s body, the prairie near Waco where the Branch Davidian standoff ended in flames. These events occurred on nondescript patches of Texas land, any of which could be subjects for Bozzi’s painting.