Julie STAFFORD
MY ART
My art allows me to look deeper into my experiences and interpret them with photography and painting. By sharing my works with you I hope you can see and feel what I have seen and felt.
My art allows me to capture my observations and colour those observations with the feelings that rise up in me when I use more than my eyes to see what is before me.
You have to let your emotions get involved in your art to fully comprehend the meaning of what your eyes are recording.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My art is a result of my intense curiosity to know more about my physical and spiritual world. Through my writing, photography, and painting, I like exploring that which existing physics and mathematics cannot explain. For example, the concept of synchronicity fascinates me. I wonder what role synchronicity plays in my evolution. Through my art I am attempting to come up with an explanation for the occurrence of highly improbable coincidences between events where there is no causal link but there is meaning to me. Through my camera lens I challenge myself to find the angle not so obvious and then work with multiple resources to distort, manipulate and change what I have captured to make my unique art. Painting with acrylics offers me a totally different experience to what my camera and editing applications offer me. Using thick layers of vibrant acrylics I aim to capture your attention and invite you into my unexpected and unexplainable experiences.
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE STUDIO?
PHOTOGRAPHY
After promising myself, and several clients that I would, the pandemic lockdowns and isolation was the catalyst for finally opening my fine art prints shop. My original fine art prints are created from my travels and general observations of life photography library, and from my acrylic paintings too. Multiple images across both mediums are sometimes manufactured into creating one unique image and therefore film grain and blur are purposefully manipulated to give my prints more of an aged art effect than a clear photograph effect. Each print has different size options and only10 prints of each size will ever be available. When you order a print you will receive the print number that follows the last print sold beginning from number 1-10. Printed on ILLFORD GALERIE TEXTURED COTTON RAG 310gsm, using inkjet printing to create the finest original art image, the result is unsurpassed colour depth using inks that meet the most stringent archival standards. They also set the international standard in fine art print image quality. Prints are ready for framing and can be shipped anywhere in the world. Prints are signed, numbered and will arrive with a certificate of authentication.
PAINTING
Currently, I'm working on a suite of acrylic paintings that tell the small stories within the bigger story of my debut novel - 'Seagulls on the Ganges'. Though fiction, only a handful of experiences that make up my story are not mine. Initially, I wanted to call my book ‘Coincidences too Coincidental’ because that’s what my coincidences were – moments almost too coincidental to believe. But at the same time, trying to make sense of all the strange coincidences that collided after my husband’s passing, I also wanted to pay homage to the seagulls that opened my eyes to a world beyond where I existed.
Though it would be easy to assume my story began just days after my husband’s passing, when I discovered a disorientated seagull on my beach house balcony, it could just as easily have started on the terrace of a villa in Santorini when a seagull captured my attention for reasons I couldn’t explain then, and still can’t today. Or, perhaps my story began in a taxi when the taxi driver, Rahul, shared a touching story that his mother told him about why thousands of seagulls fly low on the Ganges. At the time he shared his simple story with me, I could never have imagined how his words would change the course of my life forever.
Inspired by the stories in my art I hope others who have experienced coincidences too coincidental and who have questioned the possible meaning behind such experiences will share their stories and let us together examine a world beyond our current knowing.
Each piece of my art shares an extraordinary synchronistic moment that took me on a journey through love, loss, grief and defining my way forward to build a new life. My novel is not quite a memoir, but it's close. My book has been my platform to share that which is unexpected, unexplainale yet in its telling it opens the doors to ask questions so that we might know more in an eer evolving world. My thought-provoking seagull stories (original works on canvas and prints) invite you to look deeply into your everyday experiences to find those colliding events (too coincidental to ignore) that connect us to our bigger story.
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I've achieved two successful seagull exhibitions and I'm currently working on a suite of new works for a third exhibition.
GALLERY AND DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED.
Whether you are an art collector looking for something different to add to your collection or you are dressing up a corporate space, a beach house, or a home, you are invited to enquire about a piece of my unique seagull art as I progress to the finish line. Perhaps you will fall in love with my art or perhaps it will be the deeper story within my art that will connect you to it.
Works will be available for sale during the exhibition.
FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS
BELIEVING IN SEAGULLS'
a sensory experience of colour, texture and story telling on canvas
If you would like to know more about my BELIEVING IN SEAGULLS series
please reach out on the contact form provided below