Savannah, GA (PRWEB) November 19, 2009
Who doesn't remember his or her first car? Yet now that shining dream of youth has yielded to the passage of time and become . . . a "Clunker". Julia Licht-Furnari, The New York Times and New Yorker featured artist noted for her lively portrayals of everyday life, has decided to immortalize these icons in permanent tile art.
Her colorful portrayals, however, are not the sleek automobiles featured in Vanity Fair ads, but rather the used and abused cars of hard-driven streets, now arthritic and often abandoned. Julia paints them with all their bumps and fissures, spending their retirement years unattended on lonely lots, perhaps remembering the lost love of their first owners.
The unique medium of tile art allows Julia Licht-Furnari to use the thousand-year-old technique of painting with colored glazes, which fuse with the 6x6 inch ceramic supports when fired in a kiln. She is thus using the most durable of all painting media to permanently capture the brief life of today's nostalgic clunkers. The artist is aiming for one hundred clunkers on tiles.
Julia's earlier tile portraits of motorcycles, mopeds and even tricycles are already enjoying a spell-bound audience. Her unique tile art has been selected, for example, by Gianfranco Mastrangelo of Manhattan restaurant fame for his new Quattro Gatti restaurant in Austin Texas.
Critics have characterized Julia Licht-Furnari as a natural observer of people and the gestures and objects that reveal them: a profound and witty interpreter of human character. "I'll see a great face, and I'll have to go home and draw it," she says of her water color and india ink works. "I look for people who looked like they've lived a thousand lives." Julia's art combines elements of social satire with humor, wit and more than a little bit of love, comments one reviewer.
Julia Licht-Furnari is a graduate in printmaking, painting and drawing from the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. "A lot of my influence was from the French illustrators at the turn of the century," says the forty-year-old illustrator. She was born in New York City, grew up in St. James, NY and lives with her husband Sergio Furnari (also an artist) and their daughters Jade, Azzurra and Ivory.
Her work is available in selected galleries, through art consultants and designers, and on her website http://www.tileartjulia.com.
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The artist is aiming for one hundred clunkers on tiles.
