Juliet Pennay was raised in a small town in Colorado where she feared volcanoes and the dinosaurs that lived under the hills. As she got older it was ghosts, railroad tracks and snakes. Red ones, like the great river that wound through the valley where she lived, slithered into her dreams and woke her with a bite.
It was images like this that drew Juliet to art. With pencil in hand she could sketch out the wilds of her imagination - and she did - from a very young age.
"Whenever anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up," She recalls, "I would always say ARTIST."
She pursued it continuously in her formative years, struggling against the characters who always seemed to show up in the last act, telling her she couldn’t "be" and artist. Sometimes she gave in. She tried being a waitress, but was too clumsy. She tried working at department stores but hated folding shirts (and still does). She tried being a secretary, but more often than not she forgot what day it was. It turned out that "being" an artist was the only thing she was really good at.
For her debut exhibition she found her inspiration in the imagination that has always haunted her: her dreams.
"Sometimes I wake up and I can’t erase the images. They’re so real I could touch them. The only thing I knew to do with them was put them to paper."
‘Putting them to paper’, though, seems a bit of an understatement.
In beautyofDREAMS, Juliet displays thirteen vivid translations of the inner workings of her brain. They are a feast for the eyes - charming and creepy and humorous all at once. You find them sticking in your mind the way they must have in Juliet’s before she laid them to rest in paper cuttings and adhesive.
Currently residing in Austin, Juliet’s art has finally found a place to flourish.
"I’m feeding it the right stuff," She jokes.
But her work is no joke. It is clearly her passion, as well as an intimate part of her being that she so graciously has decided to share with the world. And the world anxiously awaits more.
Juliet Pennay lives in Austin, TX with her two fat cats and a revolving door of her favorite people. She hates crunchy peanut butter, radio commercials, leaf blowers and work. She loves night swimming, bike riding, coffee, crime dramas and sleeping.
