Julia O'Reilly is an Oregon painter whose work explores the emotional life of place through color, light, and atmosphere. Throughout her career, O'Reilly has been drawn to places that carry emotional resonance as well as physical beauty. She allows a place—its changes of light and atmosphere and quiet rhythms—to guide the work. Her paintings seek to translate lived experience into a language of color and light.
Influenced by Impressionism, Fauvism, and Abstract Expressionism, O'Reilly's paintings balance observation with intuition. Writer Renardo Barden described her work as depicting "an Oregon of stillness, brilliant with a hyper color other artists only dream of." Color is her subject and her vocabulary, allowing viewers to experience place as felt, remembered, and imagined.
Her technique is informed by the Impressionists, Fauvists, and Abstract Expressionists, but the effect is uniquely her own—a rich, searching surface where color and form marry feeling and narrative. She describes her painting process as a practice to identify the core of her experience. She works to translate that experience into a language of color and light.
Her work has exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest, including Portland's Augen Gallery. It is held in public and private collections including the University of Oregon, the Heathman Collection, Security Pacific Bank, and the Portland Metropolitan Arts Commission's Visual Chronicle of Portland. Her work has appeared in The Oregonian and the Oregon Bach Festival Program Guide. It has received honors including a Purchase Award from Oregon Printmakers' Annual and an Honorable Mention at the Sunriver Art Competition.
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” — Thomas Merton