Julie Niskanen

JULIE NISKANENbIo

Julie Niskanen was born in Greenville, South Carolina. Because of family moves, she also lived in Delaware and Chicago, and her education took her to Ames, Iowa and Vermillion, South Dakota. Her studies also took her to Rome, Italy for a summer. Living in so many places and having a wide range of experiences have been important influences on her work. Julie received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Iowa State University in 2005. She recently received a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking at the University of South Dakota where she also taught Drawing I. She attends conferences and workshops across the country and has been a visiting artist at Iowa State University and Loyola Academy. This summer she is moving to Raleigh, N.C. with her husband, where she plans to continue teaching and working as a professional artist. Julie’s work has been exhibited extensively in national and international exhibitions, and is in many private collections.

Website created by Julie Niskanen, updated June 2008

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 the 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, began to rock her first plate and has been making mezzotints ever since. Since she started graduate school, Julie has been in many national and international juried exhibitions, 7 publications, and has given several printmaking workshops.
          Her mezzotints have varied from the small 3” x 4” and 4” x 6” plates to 9” x 12” plates and now even larger 18” x 24” plates. Julie also began to do 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. Her most recent work has been large (16” x 20” and 18” x 24”) multiple plate prints that combine mezzotint with other intaglio techniques. She is now brainstorming for her next project, which will be an even larger piece. The plan is to do a multiple plate print that is around 24” x 36”.