Julie T. Chapman's work often features a wild animal or group of animals captured in their environment in a "relatively loose but naturalistic style." Other works may exude the animal's mannerisms or behavior with the background abstracted. Either way, she applies her paint with a palette knife, sometimes in layers of thin paint, other times thickly.

From a young age she produced an unending stream of horse drawings, influenced by a childhood on an Ohio farm. Years later she moved to take a job with Hewlett-Packard as a computer engineer. While working in California, she began taking weekend hiking and backpacking trips in various mountain ranges around the West and discovered "more animals than horses!"

"It was my first awake...