Julia Solano (she/they) is a vaguely nomadic plein air landscape painter, participatory researcher and designer, natural builder, and risograph printmaker from Oakland, California of Ilokano and Bisayan descent.
She studied Design through Engineering and Architecture at UC Berkeley and has designed and built physical and digital spaces for communing in Jordan, Thailand, Greece, Ghana, Colombia, India, Brazil, and around the US. She has spent the past decade living in communes, cooperatives, and experimental cities and is deeply curious about community infrastructure, relationship with the more-than-human world, and imagining and building towards more hopeful futures.
Her watercolor plein air paintings are a meditation of place – sitting with the land and witnessing the colors, textures, and hues then interpreting and integrating those inputs through repeated dipped color and brush stroke.
She then scans those paintings, separates the colors, and create risograph reproductions – digital then analog iterations or translations, spirit of place flattened, separated, then recontextualized back on paper form, more or less aligned.
Learn more about her work at juliasolano.com.