My art celebrates our fellow travelers on this planetary ark, in a style that asks participation from you, my viewer.

I'm a Montana-based artist with an abiding love of the modern American west -- its wildlife, horses, cowboys, and cowgirls. My mission is to share my wonder at the beauty and sentience of the animal nations with which we share this planet, and to connect you to Nature with my work.

The inspiration
My painting process has evolved into a ‘disrupted realism’ style, where my subjects are fragmented, and the final outcome of each piece is unknown at the start; the journey involves abstraction, drawing, scraping, and re-working — all in a search for “the right amount of not enough”.

The fragmented, ‘incomplete’ aspect of these paintings is my response to the chaos and change that is everywhere in our environment - social, political, natural. Many of the paintings are intended to confront the viewer, to spur us to ask questions of ourselves and of each other. The “Vanishing Ark” series is one example; these pieces are a response to the UN report in summer 2019 that a million or more species are likely to go extinct soon.

The ‘incompleteness’ of my subjects also feels to me as if it is revealing something more elemental, more essential...perhaps reflecting my own deep emotion and love for the animals I paint. These pieces require a deep, wordless conversation; they demand more from me than any other body of work I’ve done before, and I frequently struggle with self-doubt in the process…yet each painting that works is deeply satisfying.

Commissions
I emphasize consultative commissions and working with you to find the right art for your collection. My art is based on a lifetime of fieldwork and experience, and part of every sale is donated to conservation causes.

News
If you like what you see here, please sign up for my once-a-month email newsletter, the Artzine, which features news, new images, and occasionally a bit of philosophical musing - sometimes even questions for you, my reader.

Gallery representation

FoR Fine Art
Whitefish, MT - 406 . 730 . 8855
Bigfork, MT - 406 . 420 . 2453

Gallery Wild
Jackson, WY - 307 . 203 . 2322
Santa Fe, NM - 505 . 467 . 8297

Illume Gallery West
Philipsburg, MT - 435 . 313 . 5008

Jones & Terwilliger
Carmel, CA — 831 . 626 . 9100
Palm Desert, CA — 760 . 674 . 8989

Rowe Gallery
Sedona, AZ - 928 . 282 . 8877

Sanders Galleries
Tucson, AZ - 520 . 299 . 1763

Sorrel Sky Gallery
Durango, CO - 970 . 247 . 3555

Julie T. Chapman

I adored horses, but never had one as a kid (even though I grew up on a small family farm in Ohio! the injustice of it all...). I loved science, math, and art, so - naturally enough - got an engineering degree and went to work for HP in northern California after college. There I finally got into horses, and competed in dressage and 3-day eventing for years.

Despite long hours in R&D and marketing at HP, I never stopped drawing. Winning the 2002 Arts for the Parks $50,000 Grand Prize kicked me in the butt in many ways, so we moved from California to Montana, and I became a full-time artist. I already knew and loved Yellowstone and Glacier for wildlife reference material, but in Montana I discovered the joys of small-town summertime rodeo (color! drama! horses in action!).

...and a little longer version...

My deepest thanks to Norman Kolpas for his terrific article on my work in the April 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine.