“I think of two landscapes – one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see – not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also as plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution… The second landscape I think of is an interior one … [which] responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.” Barry Lopez

Jules Lusson has a long family history in Florida, and her work is inspired by the natural world that surrounds her. Her mixed-media paintings evoke the dream-like Everglades habitat, and combine drawings of insects, reptiles, bone and shell fragments with excavated artifacts and vintage photographs. It centers on the idea of Nature’s ability to reclaim and heal what has been destroyed, and is inspired by the landscape of both Nature and memory of South Florida. Working largely on paper, she creates elaborate dense surfaces built up layer by layer with gesso, inks, printmaking and silver leaf. She works to overlap, expose, conceal and layer a topographical surface with an inner experience.
Continuing themes of disintegration and regeneration are at play, in particular nature’s cycles of decay and transformation, the visual physicality of time, and passage of geological time, which is very visible in South Florida in its exposed coral and limestone formations. Local vines engulf anything in their path, overtaking objects and dead debris, drawing these into itself and making it apart of its expression.

Lusson received her Bachelor of Fine Art from the California College of Arts, and her Masters of Fine Art from Florida International University, and is currently an Artist in Residence at Art Center South Florida in Miami Beach.