Jamian Juliano-Villani is a thirty-one year old painter from Newark, New Jersey. Now living in New York, she draws inspiration from a wide variety of subjects ranging from things like art history to fashion. Her parents were both commercial painters, so growing up, Jamian spent quite a lot of time in their silk-screening factory and learning about graphic design. She later graduated from Rutgers University in 2013. Jamian had her very first solo art show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2015.
She typically works with acrylic paint and uses airbrush techniques to create her eye-catching, colorful masterpieces. Approaching her work with a sense of humor and light heartedness, Jamian compares her art to jokes. She claims that the paintings are tricky and need to be made weirder or dumber or smarter. “You just paint a snowman in the desert… Thats it? Really? Like, there’s no other step, you know? It’s like some stupid one-liner.” As a notorious chain smoker and drinker, she says her body is just a vessel. She believes she should do and experience things now while she has the energy. This just adds to her unique character.
Acrylic on canvas
48 × 40
In her teenage years, young Jamian Juliano-Villani remembers watching a documentary called Painters Painting (1973), which featured artist such as Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. She was so inspired that she decided to movie to New York City. She now has a studio in Ridgewood, queens. Her montra for advancing in her art? “You’re only as good as your last painting.”
acrylic on canvas
36 x 40.5 inches
After her very first solo exhibition, Me, Myself and Jah, in 2013 at Rawson Projects, she did an interview with Johnathan Griffin. Featured on ARTnews is a quote of hers about her own work. She says, “My paintings are meant to function like TV, in a way. The viewer is supposed to become passive. Instead of alluding or whispering, like a lot of art does, this is art that tells you what’s up. It kind of does the work for you, like TV does.”[
acrylic on canvas
20.00 x 16.00 in
She has recently had an art show in early 2018 called Ten Pound Hand that earned grand reviews such as this one from critic Zoë Lescaze, “In Gone with the Wind (all works 2018), a cartoon fish gluts itself on Coca-Cola while a helpless-looking firefighter floats above burning California. October depicts an ash-choked Pompeian infant blowing across an empty school hallway. The linoleum floor is littered with shattered glass, in an eerie evocation of recent school shootings. Together, these works convey a loss of control, of entropy overriding security, idealism, and best-case scenarios.”
acrylic on canvas
40 x 48 inches
My personal favorite quote of hers is about deadlines in art. She states that “Stress assassinates creativity.”
acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 inches
