Josephine Halvorson grew up in Cape Cod and is still based in Massachusetts. She is an oil painter based on real life observations based on real time perceptions. She first studied art on the beaches of Provincetown at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She attended The Cooper Union School of Art, Yale Norfolk, and continued her interdisciplinary education at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Josephine Halvorson has taught at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Columbia University

Both of Halvorson’s parents were artists as well. Her father taught art and made kinetic metal sculptures. Her mother studied painting and metal became her medium upon meeting her father. In her childhood, her mother inspired her and being the only child with no one to compare herself to- it became her mission to be as good as her mother. Josephine’s competitiveness with her mother eventually lead to her mother stopping art to allow her daughter to just be able to draw and not compare herself to her mother. Because Cape Cod isn’t far from New York City, she spent most of her childhood summers in art galleries and attributes this context of her childhood as a factor in her success.

Upon the completion of her interdisciplinary education at The Cooper Union School of Art, she spent a year in Austria, in which she described the experience to be a tremendous period of growth for her as an artist. She described her goal going into it as, “My proposal was to paint portraits in relation to both psychology and expressionism in painting. In other words, what’s the relationship of me, the artist, to a subject—whether it’s a person, an object, an environment, or whatever—and how can painting address this question in ways that other forms of art can’t.”

Halvorson often completes her paintings in a single session because she works on site. She finds objects in their environment that feels “look back” at her. Her process includes prolonged closeness and shared experience with her chosen subject matter and the human quality of their tools, their graffiti, their wear and tear. One could conclude that she practices art in its most basic form, which is highlighting the human experience and perception of the environment around us.

Halvorson’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Mexico. Her solo New York exhibitions “What Looks Back” and “Clockwise From Window” at Monya Rowe were highly acclaimed.

Slow Burn is my favorite piece I came across. Upon discussing the selection, Halvorson described her process as, “My practice is one of understanding an object in time: its history, its function, its place in the world, its environment—and my own relationship to it,” the artist has said. The Southeastern Center for Contemporary art exclaimed that, “Halvorson’s twenty-three portraits of the inanimate world bear witness to a haptic encounter between herself, her subject, the material of paint, plus time.”