Artist Statement

The Image of a Sound began with a question: What does music look like when it moves through the body? For this series, I listen to a particular musical composition and allow my body to respond to it before my mind begins to interpret it. I work directly on raw canvas, using movement, dripping, and pouring to translate rhythm, emotion, repetition, and intensity into visual form. Each painting is dedicated to the composition that generated it and becomes a physical record of that encounter between sound, body, and material.

The process is both intentional and intuitive. Dripping carries a more assertive, directional energy, while pouring requires surrender—allowing gravity, material, and chance to participate in the work. I am interested in the tension between these two states: control and release, action and acceptance.

Music is inherently ephemeral. It exists in time, enters the body, creates an emotional and physical response, and disappears. Painting allows me to preserve something of that experience. I do not attempt to illustrate music. Instead, I ask what remains after listening: a movement, an emotion, a memory, an internal shift.

The Image of a Sound is my attempt to make that invisible experience visible.

— Julia iSABEL

About JULIA iSABEL

Julia iSABEL is a Ukrainian-American multidisciplinary artist based in Connecticut whose practice explores the intersections of perception, movement, sound, memory, and embodied experience. Working across painting, printmaking, performance, and mixed media, she employs intuitive gesture and the body as instruments for translating ephemeral experiences into visual form.

iSABEL holds a summa cum laude BA in Art & Design from Sacred Heart University. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and art fairs in the United States and internationally, including the Florence Biennale, Art Miami, LA Art Show, Yale University, and the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA). Her works are held in private and institutional collections. She maintains her studio practice at MNTD Artist Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she continues to develop interdisciplinary bodies of work investigating the relationship between human experience, movement, and material.