Julie Edwards
“Enchanted Celtic Rainforest”
Oil on Canvas
4ft x 2ft
“Enchanted Celtic Rainforest”
‘Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”
~ Rene Magritte
This is a painting in response to the ancient Celtic rainforest, Llennyrch in Wales I visited a few years ago. Looking into the depths of the forest, you see an opening of light towards the magic, myths, secrets and mystery of the history of the woodlands.
Bio
Born in 1970 in Lancashire, Julie Edwards (Prev. known as Julie McNally-Hayes) graduated with a 1st Class Honours Degree from Wolverhampton University in 1991 where she is now based and works in her new studio at the bottom of her garden. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Julie has been working steadily ever since, progressing from large semi abstract paintings that often took on an aerial view of the industrial landscape towards a more sophisticated and personalised, semi-representational format of the natural world.
Julie has had many exhibitions, including many solo exhibitions and has recently exhibited work in San Francisco and Canada and is represented by Gallery 44 in Bragg Creek, Canada.
Julie’s work is preoccupied with an intense inquisitiveness about the world she inhabits. She says that, ‘ I do not endeavour to portray a realistic painting of the landscape, but aim to show the relationships and interactions of human beings within it.’
Inspired by the natural landscape as her source material, and achieved through a meditative painting process or simply through the thrill of using paint or other media, she places the viewer into the painting to experience the landscape. The works are borne out of the accumulation of many references but are always inspired firstly from a place visited as well as; nostalgia, literature, myths, traces, and spiritual response to the ephemeral nature of light, creating something either beautiful or peaceful or creating an uneasy landscape where the tensions are shown by the vast, bleak wilderness of it all.
Currently Julie strives to provide a visual seduction, sometimes a subliminal experience, putting the viewer into a more thoughtful and ‘idealised’ vision of the world, a form of escapism from this current unsettled world.
Email: jojuartwork@gmail.com