JULIE HIMEL | AWE STRUCK | ADVANCE PREVIEW
December 4 - 20, 2025
Opening First Thursday, December 4, 6 - 8 pm
Artist in Attendance
Artist Talk, Saturday, December 6, 12 pm
Awe Struck is a series born from a personal and visceral response to the natural world—places where beauty overwhelms, silence roars, and the ordinary dissolves into the sublime. These paintings are not just depictions of landscape; they are experiences of rupture—moments where the familiar falls away and something larger, stranger, and more luminous asserts itself.
The title Awe Struck serves as both a descriptor and a tension. “Awe” speaks to the reverence and wonder inspired by nature’s immensity—towering skies, fractured light, ancient trees, shifting waters. But “Struck” reminds us that awe is not passive. It arrives with force. It is a jolt—a disruption—a breaking open. This duality runs through the work. The paintings evolve through layers of intuitive gesture and deliberate fracture, echoing the way awe enters the body: suddenly, and without permission.
In each piece, I seek to capture that collision—where perception is pierced, and the veil of apathy is torn. I want to hold onto that moment of contact, when the external world imprints itself on the internal, when seeing becomes feeling. These are not tranquil landscapes. They are thresholds. They carry the pulse of immediacy, the rawness of presence, the ache of beauty too large to name.
Through paint, I explore how awe can undo us in the best way—how it strikes to the core and leaves us changed. In a time when disconnection is easy, these works are a call back to sensation, to wonder, and to the fierce, necessary act of paying attention. - Julie Himel
For a listing of more available work and biographical information, please visit Julie Himel's primary page on our website.
