Julie Niskanen spent her first seven years in Greenville, South Carolina, and family moves eventually took her to Newark, Delaware and Chicago, Illinois. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Iowa State University in 2005. During the summer of 2003 she lived and studied in Rome, Italy, and traveled around Europe. In 2008, Julie received a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from the University of South Dakota, where she also managed the fine art gallery and taught drawing classes. Julie now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she works as a professional artist and teaches art courses at Sandhills Community College, Central Carolina Community College, and Wake Technical Community College. Additionally, she teaches printmaking workshops in Raleigh. Julie is also part of the Artspace Artists Association in Raleigh, Davidson Galleries in Seattle, and the Washington Printmakers Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Living in so many places and having experienced many different environments have had a significant influence on Julie's creative work. She uses images from nature to represent changes in both nature as well as her own life. Always stimulated by the contemporary art world, Julie attends conferences and workshops across the country and gives visiting artist workshops at various art centers and universities. Her award-winning work has been exhibited extensively in national and international exhibitions, and is in many private and public collections. During 2010, she will have mezzotints and etchings on exhibit in Irbit, Russia; Seattle, WA; Washington D.C.; Ada, OH; and Raleigh, North Carolina. Additional shows will be added later in the year.Julie's printmaking history:
Julie started printmaking her junior year of college (2003) at Iowa State University. A friend talked her into signing up for a class even though she was not at all interested or educated about printmaking. To her surprise, she was immediately hooked. She was completely amazed by all of the effects and unique results attainable through printmaking. After her first year of printmaking classes at ISU, Julie took an etching workshop at Frogman's Press & Gallery in 2004, and has been addicted to printmaking ever since. That same year, she also attended the Mid America Print Council conference and then the Southern Graphics Council conference to learn more about printmaking. Since then, Julie has attended the conferences every year.
Julie continued to attend Frogman's Press & Gallery workshops for the following three years while also working as an assistant in the workshops. After graduating from ISU in 2005, she went directly to Vermillion, SD to work on a Master’s degree in printmaking. She became very interested in the mezzotint after seeing some mezzotints in galleries, print conferences, and printmaking workshops. So she decided that graduate school would be the perfect place to learn and master the technique.
When Julie started graduate school, fall of 2005, she bought the mezzotint book by Carol Wax and began researching. During that semester of graduate school, Ryan O’Malley came as a visiting artist where she helped edition some of his mezzotints. After being involved with printing Ryan's plates, she knew that she would love the process. She then ordered a rocker, rocked her first plate and has been making mezzotints ever since.
Her mezzotints have varied from the small 4” x 6” plates to 9” x 12” plates and now even larger 18” x 24” plates. Julie also withs with multiple plate prints that combined hard-ground etching, mezzotint, aquatint, and spit-bite techniques. For these prints, she selectively rocked areas of the plate, so that certain image areas would be a mezzotint image, while other colors and textures from other intaglio techniques would create the rest of the image.