Julie
Garfield.

About the Artist

A painter who learned the craft from life itself.

Julie Garfield came to painting the way she came to everything — through instinct and necessity. The daughter of actor John Garfield, who died when she was six, she grew up surrounded by the mythology of a man she barely knew. The paintings are not about him. But they carry his shadow in the way all serious work carries the things we cannot say out loud.

Trained at the New York Studio School and the Art Students League, Garfield works in oil on canvas — figurative, dense, built up from observation and then torn back. There is a film noir quality to her palette: blues that go almost black, reds that have already cooled. She has also worked in theater and film — including a role in Goodfellas — and that experience lives in the work. The figures in her paintings know something you don’t.

Her 2024 solo exhibition at Lift Trucks Art, The Artist Rings Twice, marked the first time her recent series had been shown in the Hudson Valley. The title is a play on her father’s 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice — and a recognition that some artists get two careers. She worked for decades on stage and screen, and then rang again as a painter.

“She paints the way her father acted — with total commitment and nothing held back.”

Lift Trucks Art