The Community Arts Council of the Alberni Valley is thrilled to launch the first installment of our Featured Artist Series, shining a spotlight on one of our remarkable local artists every two weeks. These profiles appear across our social media, website, and in the newspaper, celebrating the creativity thriving in our community.
Our inaugural feature highlights Julia Tahnee Oscarson, an abstract painter and creator whose work explores movement, emotion, and the subtle rhythms of the natural world. Julia discovered her passion for painting early in life, later honing her craft at the Victoria College of Art.
Beginning with traditional mediums, figures and landscapes, Julia’s practice naturally evolved toward abstraction. Guided by intuition, she increasingly embraced texture, layering, and fluid mark-making, cultivating a style that is distinctly her own.
Julia’s connection to art deepened throughout high school and further blossomed during years spent in Europe, immersed in museums and art history. These experiences profoundly shaped her artistic sensibility, fostering a keen intuition that informs her work today.
Her creative process allows abstraction to emerge organically through layered textures, dynamic movement, and subtle shifts of color and light. Influenced by travels across Europe and Southeast Asia, her paintings reflect sensitivity to place, atmosphere, and the ephemeral states of perception.
While Julia’s work is primarily abstract, her current series draws inspiration from fish, using their forms as symbols of flow, freedom, and transformation. Each painting invites quiet contemplation, blurring the line between form and feeling, and offering space for the viewer’s own interpretation.
Oscarson’s artwork can be found in private collections across North America and internationally, with work included in the Sketchbook Project at the Brooklyn Art Library in New York. Last year, Julia had her very first solo exhibition, Fluid Motion here, in Port Alberni at the Grove Gallery and has also participated in group exhibitions such as the Under 100 Exhibition in Vancouver and across the globe including Canada, South Korea, and Thailand.
When asked what advice she would give to emerging artists, Julia emphasized:
“Stay consistent and don’t wait until your work feels ‘perfect’ to share it. Growth happens through doing, not overthinking. The more you create, the more your voice becomes clear.”
Julia is based in Port Alberni, BC, and select pieces of her evocative work are available at the Local Artisan Gift Shop in the Alberni Valley Chamber of Commerce & Visitor Centre.
To view her portfolio of works, head to her website: www.juliaoscarson.com and check out her instagram: @hello.i.paint Follow our social media, website, or newspaper every two weeks to discover the next incredible local artist in the Featured Artist Series.
