Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Julie Christine. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Julie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

One of the most meaningful projects I have done was Resilient Rebirth. Each piece in the tryptic represents my own transformation which I share with those I mentor in personal development. In She Got Away, I use the blues in her dress to represent not just the sadness from having lost so many people in a short period of time, but also the depth from which I had journeyed through personal development in overcoming people pleasing, societal judgement, and toxic influences. In Ginger, I really rose from the ashes like a phoenix bird to transform my meditations from a series of canvas into a dress that illustrated the acceptance of my scars, my mistakes, and a rebuilding of my life which ushered in my self embrace. I was getting my first adult portrait done when building the dress came to mind. I had to build a permanent dress for Ginger, the mannequin, a gift from my dad’s garage after he passed away, who had kept me company during the days of COVID while running his legacy restaurant to my studio where I work on philosophical concepts in sacred geometry, solar philosophy and hermetic teachings. Ginger deserves to be adorned in that process. In She Embraced, a figure bathed in soft pinks dances freely symbolizing the freedom that comes with embracing one’s true self. It’s a vivid tribute to the strength found in self-love and the empowerment that arises from inner peace. It was while making these pieces that I was diagnosed with autoimmune disease and learned to transform pain. This was the most meaningful project to me since Create Ideal Now which took decades to establish.

Julie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My Mission for the last 30 years has been to understand how humans develop and help others to reach their full potential. Most of my work has been in and around education as I have moved through behavior intervention, school counseling and mostly facilitating personal and professional development. I developed curriculum for supporting infant neurological development in my Baby Brain Builders program. I worked with authors of self help books and created the Art and Science of Self which I have facilitated for both teens/pre-teens and adults. I have authentically practiced what I teach in the Los Angeles area, now in my new life on the Central Coast, I am expanding my creativity in visual arts with the support of my Husband and my Son.

My work explores the convergence of energy, imperfection, and transformation. With a background in black and white photography, a masters and career in recording engineering and music as well as Social Artistry, I now channel the creative energy directly into my visual practice. Using a blowtorch and burning tools, I scorch the canvas to create a raw textured foundation. Over this I layer inks, stains, oils, and paints weaving together images that feel both natural and fluid. There is no room for squareness in the exposed nonlinear edges of burnt canvas floating over the hidden frame breathing life into the spontaneous image.

Through this controlled chaos, I aim to capture grace with imperfection and explore how perception shapes experience. Many works reflect a metamorphosis, where fragments of the past touch the immediacy of the moment. Exploring the Line and the Circle as symbols of creation, transformation, and presence I ponder what it means to Create Ideal Now. These forms embody the balance of Masculine and Feminine energies – thought and emotion, structure and fluidity. Through my work, I am asking viewers what it means to create? What is ideal? How do you create ideal in every present moment? It’s fascinating to see how perception shapes those answers.

Looking to the future insinuates acknowledging the past. I come from a family in Phoenix Arizona, where my parents were married ten times between the two of them. I went to 7 – 10 different schools, I grew up working hard in my dad’s restaurant and learned how to run a business. I put myself through school and moved to LA where I got married, had a son, became a single mom, started many businesses, and remarried. I learned how to transform and I want to help others transform. As for the future, it would be a dream come true to create a customized fully immersive experience that guides individuals through the transformation they would like to make. I invite a team to join me in that quest. In the meantime, I serve low income communities improving their memory, mood and sleep through neurofeedback when I’m not engrossed in my creative endeavours. One day at a time the future will unfold.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I speak about transformation a lot and a big part of it is the ability to pivot. I have two moments where the pivot was critical to moving forward. First in the restaurant during COVID and again when my creative work transitioned.

After my father passed away in 2018 my son’s father also passed a few months later, we moved to the Central Coast for a fresh start but my son wanted to carry on his grandfather’s legacy. My response to opening a restaurant was, “Oh HELL NO!”. But I looked at my 18 year old son and thought, this is a great opportunity for him to learn how to be responsible and utilize what he had learned at the city college where he majored in Business and Marketing. Yes, He had four years of city college under his belt because I had home schooled him for High School and dual enrollment was free. By August of 2019, we had opened Captain Bill’s Subs and I was reliving those years with my dad when I had run two of his restaurants for him. Not the best choice when morning the loss of him but better than crying in bed all day. Then COVID hit.

We immediately jumped in to serve those working in hospitals and volunteer makeshift services. But as things grew to just delivery orders, my husband and I saw the opportunity to expand. We opened what they call ghost kitchens. This just meant that we had a few different websites for a few different restaurants that all came out of our one little kitchen. We were busier than we could handle. Staff was hard to come by and quality staff was non-existent. We sold the sandwich shop in 2021 but if we hadn’t made the pivot to expanding the kitchen from soups, salads, and subs to include breakfast, scram-bowls and burritos, my son’s first business would have ended before it got off the ground. Today my son still has business ideas but he is taking his time to develop himself and those ideas after that first hand experience. Making that pivot helped me to see the value in making changes in my art process as well.

I’m always the first to jump off of a cliff in creativity or business. But when I was getting stuck expressing my vision for the Line and the Circle I reflected on the restaurant and the pivot. Growing up, I was always there in the workshop with my dad building and making things for the sandwich shop. We used resin for the counters and table tops highlighting the 99 cent sub and drink special with 99 pennies.

I had been pouring paint and working flat with bright colors. Now I wanted to showcase an ancient message so I wanted to use raw canvas with stains to communicate through the Line & Circle which I was casting in resin as though it were an artifact. I was using a blowtorch to cure the bubbles out of the resin as it dried and had some raw canvas just lying around. Naturally, the pyro in me had to burn the canvas and it opened an whole new world for me.

I had dozens of burnt canvases but I couldn’t figure out how to frame them. With the canvas no longer being perfectly square due to the burns and wanting to let the edges flow freely, framing seemed impossible. I tried using resin to hold the canvas to stretched leather then framing it. I tried gluing the canvas to stretched leather that again could be framed. My first pivot in this was to start seeking out other artists and modalities. While attending the Open Studios Art Tour in San Luis Obispo, I met Steve Andrews. He and his family became fast friends to our family. He engineered a system that connected the frame to the canvas while allowing the burnt edges to show and giving the art an airy flow. I suddenly was showing my art in galleries and shows all the way down to the Orange County Center for Contemporary Arts. This pivot moved me from renting wall space to show and sell my art to actually getting accepted into shows through open calls. It’s still a struggle to have the fine art world embrace something new such as burnt imperfect edges uniquely framed but I’m jumping off that cliff with glee.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

It might surprise some people who only know me as the philosopher, artist and advocate for humanistic education —but I genuinely like technology. In fact, I did get my Masters in Recording Engineering. I was drawn to the merging of analog with digital until the egos in the music industry pushed me to step back and ask bigger questions: Why are people the way they are?
and How can we evolve?

When a friend suggested I check out Ray Kurzweil’s book on “The Singularity is Near”, I devoured it. My dad had been mining crypto before he passed away so I was aware of it but I was more interested now so I went down the blockchain rabbit hole learning everything I could. My Poor husband did not want me teaching him the difference between SHA-256 and Kecceck-256 or how L1s would advance L2s. I was all alone in my quest to understand Defi and Web3.

When the summer of NFTs came, as an artist, I resisted my urge to jump off that cliff. I was already learning the pain of bleeding edge technology as it can evolve faster than we can keep up. I lost money chasing zkEVM technology only for it to become obsolete before coming to to fruition so I understood that NFTs would also evolve.

For art, what excites me are dynamic NFTs – the kind that hold video games, music, films, or interactive content. I’ve minted some of my own artworks, but I wouldn’t list them unless they were dynamic. By dynamic, I mean more than just an image.

One of my favorite AI artists is Kelly Boesch. If I could own her short films as NFTs and play them at will, I’d love that! But you’ll never catch me buying a static NFT – unless it gets me into a concert or verifies my credentials or ownership of something in the real world.

It’s unfortunate that NFTs have such a bad rap when their true potential hasn’t yet been realized. Much like quantum science, many of my peers and elders have dismissed it based on early impressions or media noise. They’re still rooted in the Newtonian thinking, resistant to the unknown. But to dismiss NFTs just because early iterations failed as JPEGs is to lock oneself out of the unfolding future.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.juliechristinecinart.com
• Instagram: @cin432art
• Other: tiktok @CIN432art

Image Credits

Andrea Fine took the portrait of me in the dress: [email protected] andreafineportrait.co