Julie Drake

Artist Statement

When I came here over 30 years ago, I quickly fell in love with Alaska, and with a born-and-raised Alaskan, a homesteaders’ kid. We built a life and business, and do what good Alaskans do: fish, camp, kayak, ski, hike, boat, put up salmon and berries, and flirt midwinter with moving Outside.

I began sewing as a girl, then quilting later, making both bed and wall quilts. Although many traditional blocks are quite abstract, their regularity doesn’t always suit me. If my childhood were a quilt, it would be sewn from blocks named Drunkard’s Path, and Robbing Peter to Pay Paul. Today, I try to sew quilts less scripted but equally descriptive.

A poet and quilter, I make art to express my self: quiet and rowdy, friendly and introverted, transparent and unknowable, robust, contrarian, sly. I know for sure that reality can hide truth, so lately I’ve been working in abstracts, with a solid palette, to find the essence–the spirit, the inner vibration—both in form and in color, of
objects and emotions.