KILEY COURT GALLERY

Julian Cardinal’s expressive oil paintings bring a dreamy, nostalgic sensibility to scenes of feminine figures, still lifes, and landscapes, rendered with loose brushwork and a muted, earthy palette. Born in 1988, the artist is from the tip of Cape Cod in North Truro, Massachusetts and has showcased his work at prominent galleries in New York City, Bridgehampton, NY, East Hampton, NY, Richmond, VA, Charlotte, NC, Burlington, VT, Manchester, VT, Chatham, MA, Charlestown, RI, and Provincetown, MA, where his parents have owned Kiley Court Gallery since 1991.

 

His work blends the romantic haze of Impressionism with a contemporary fascination for fashion, identity, and form, resulting in compositions that feel both timeless and distinctly modern. Often drawing from vintage black-and-white photographs, Cardinal reinterprets historical imagery through a personal lens, breathing new life into 20th-century silhouettes and quiet moments. Whether painting “The Running Girl” — a recurring, enigmatic figure in over fifty iterations — or intimate bouquets arranged in his studio, Cardinal creates works that hover between presence and memory. His figures rarely meet the viewer’s gaze; their vague features and fluid gestures suggest not anonymity, but invitation for interpretation and emotion. Informed by a lineage of French Impressionists like Monet, Cézanne, and Degas, as well as neo-expressionists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Provincetown painters such as Anne Packard and Cynthia Packard, Cardinal’s work resists technical precision in favor of mood, rhythm, and atmosphere. He paints quickly, deliberately, preferring spontaneity over control in pursuit of an honest and immediate connection with his subject.

 

As the son of renowned Cape Cod landscape painter and gallery owner Robert Cardinal, he grew up watching his dad work in his studio. At the age of 19, while enrolled as an English major with an Art minor at the University of Vermont, Cardinal began following in his father’s footsteps. Cardinal currently works out of his studio in Shelburne, Vermont.