JULIE HIMEL | SECOND NATURE

Julie Himel’s vivid paintings push the genre of landscape into striking, dreamlike representations of place, often with an element of nature's unruliness, decay, or sublime disorder. Exploring ideas of space and encounter in which people are not directly present, her paintings present opportunities to step into portraits of natural spaces, often with highly unorthodox or 'unnatural' colors. Himel uses bold, active strokes with both brush and palette knife, with generous application of brightly saturated layers of oil and acrylic paint to create richly textural surfaces.

Himel received a Diploma of Fine Art from Langara College, Vancouver, BC; a BFA Honours Degree from York University, Toronto, ON; and a Graduate Diploma from the Toronto School of Art, Toronto, ON. Himel’s paintings are in private and public collections across the world: The University of Calgary, Calgary, AB; Westfield State University, Westfield, MA; the Armenian Community Centre Art Collection, Toronto, ON and several corporate collections.

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.

2025 Awe Struck Artist Talk

2023 Exhibition Catalog Second Nature

2021 Exhibition Catalog Broken Beautiful

2020 Interview August