“Three Questions”

Julie Torres

October 29, 2025

Volume 2
Issue 14

Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?

Julie Torres: What I like best about painting is that it provides an outlet for my toxic traits and channels them in a (hopefully) productive way: impulsivity, impatience, rage, obsessiveness. It’s comforting to get lost in the making and to tune everything else out, most of all my own mind. The flow state can be a healing force. Painting is the closest I have gotten to the subconscious in the waking world.

GB: How do those states of intensity — impulsivity, rage, obsessiveness — translate into specific choices in the studio, like palette, brushwork, or the pace of your mark-making?

JT: The materials I’ve chosen, and painting process overall, are a direct result of an almost pathological impatience. No stretching, gessoing or sanding of surfaces. No solvents, mediums or elaborate setup. Acrylic paint is applied out of the jar onto wood panels, and mixed on the surface. I crave this immediacy as a way of staying present and excited about what I’m doing, but this method does not typically yield an immediate painting. Many attempts can be made on the same surface for days, weeks, months and sometimes years, before anything interesting happens. Over time, textured layers of paint build up like a crust. This is how I’ve taught myself to build a surface, and to allow a painting to appear. Although the paintings don’t always come quickly, the building of layers comes through the action of painting itself, which feeds my impulsive tendencies in a way that planning and preparation can’t. It is cathartic to throw the paint around, and to trust that something will happen.

GB: When someone encounters your paintings, they don’t just see surface and color—they bring their own unconscious expectations about what those materials ‘mean.’ How do you think about those projections, and do you want to guide them or unsettle them?

JT: Defying expectations is satisfying when it happens, but fixating on a desired outcome can be debilitating. I try to block out those voices and not focus on end results. Experimentation, accidental mishaps, and outright destruction of unresolved paintings have led to the most surprising developments. I have never found a shortcut to those places. In the meantime, I try to make paintings that hold my own attention and navigate the chaos as best I can.

Julie Torres is a Hudson NY artist and curator. Her artwork has been shown in recent exhibitions at NADA New York, Tappeto Volante in Brooklyn, Pocket Utopia and Peninsula on the Lower East Side, Driveway in Rockaway Beach, RUTHANN in Catskill NY, and Susan Eley Fine Art in Hudson NY. Torres’ artwork and curatorial projects have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, Chronogram, and on NPR and PBS. Since April 2018, she has co-directed LABspace gallery in Hillsdale NY with her partner, artist Ellen Letcher.

peel sessions, 2025
acrylic on wood panel
8 x 9 x 7 inches

nosy, 2016-2025
acrylic on wood
10.5 x 10.5 x 2 inches

lady fingers, 2025
acrylic on wood panel
8 x 8 inches

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