Winnipeg Artist featured in Chilled in Miami
JULIE Harris’s star-studded resum? includes the Renee Zellweger movie Chilled in Miami, currently shooting in Winnipeg; You Killed Me, starring Ben Kingsley; the sci-fi thriller Maneater with Gary Busey; and Vinegar Hill, featuring Mary-Louise Parker.
Funny thing is, Harris has never set foot on a film set. Her brush with the rich and famous has quite literally come through her brush — a paint brush, that is.
Harris is a Manitoba visual artist who has spent the last 30 years painting landscapes. But her artwork doesn’t just hang in galleries. It has also been featured in four Hollywood movies that were shot in Winnipeg.
“It is very exciting,” says Harris, who currently has four of her paintings on the set of Chilled in Miami, which stars Zellweger as a Miami businesswoman banished to a frigid Minnesota town with the assignment of turning around a failing factory.
“It’s a different way of having my work exposed. It’s advertising for me.”
In building sets for movies, art departments want the rooms they create to look as real as possible. So in addition to knick-knacks on tables and desktop photos, they put art on the wall. And very often these paintings are rented from local artists.
Harris, who lives just north of Winnipeg in Grosse Isle, creates photo-realistic oil paintings depicting local landscapes. Her work has been shown in galleries in Toronto, Calgary, Minneapolis and Saskatoon, and has been purchased by big companies like The Royal Bank of Canada.
…
“Chilled in Miami is set in small-town Minnesota, so we are looking for older style pieces, more traditional and not modern,” she explains. “One of the characters works in a factory and her house has a real colonial look. She is also a scrapbooker, so we put homemade crafty art purchased from thrift stores, such as cross-stitching, in her house.”
- Full Article: www.whatsonwinnipeg.com/….