Featured Artist Josephine Close

Mixed media artist Josephine Close incorporates mystical and magical elements in her nature-inspired portfolio. Learn more by visiting her website.

 

 

I am a self-taught mixed media painter based in Los Angeles. My work focuses on the intersection of art and magic.

 

 

I approach my practice from an intuitive place, seeking to convey the spiritual, no matter what my subject or medium would be.

 

 

For years I have studied various healing modalities, ancestor veneration, mediumship, tarot and divination of all kinds. As a result of those teachings, I realized that the most potent magic is the magic we make up ourselves.

 

 

My painting practice is truly my only form of magic. I treat the act as a ritual. I prepare my space—lighting candles, burning incense and preparing my tools and paper.

 

 

I set intentions for each piece. I have several altars that I tend to, to further my art practice. To me, my art making is my religion, a meditation; the paintings themselves represent a spell or a prayer.

 

 

I incorporate magic symbols in my underpainting and sometimes recognizable in the final painting itself.

 

 

I paint in a somewhat realistic fashion but crave disruption; something to make it less realistic, more its own entity. I am constantly experimenting with what I refer to as treatments. My work is acrylic ink and wax on paper. Incorporating gold, silver, diamond dust, mica and other things I can find and seeing the effect is a huge part of my practice.

 

 

I developed an allergy to oil paint and had to stop using it. I tried to devise a way to make my acrylics mimic oils, which is how I came to my current practice. It was years of experimentation that led me to my process.

 

 

As an animist, I am deeply influenced by nature. Other influences include old religious iconography, Mexican retablo or ex voto paintings, old movies, old fairy tales, poetry, early spiritualism and all kinds of magic.

 

 

I am drawn to old things, objects that have a weathered look, things that inspire a sense of nostalgia and I try to capture that feeling in my work.

 

Artist Josephine Close invites you to follow her on Instagram.

 

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