Julia Harris

Julia Harris

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graduated from McGill University, with a major in Art History, before receiving a B.F.A. at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The artist, who lives in Toronto and the Laurentians, painted and worked as a Graphic Design, running her own business at La Guilde Graphique in Montreal. In 2001 she began painting full time. She has taught design at OCAD and has served as an art juror in Canada. Harris has won awards as a watercolorist and has had solo exhibits in Toronto, in North Hatley and has participated in joint and group shows in Montreal. The artist states that the underlying theme of her work is to: “distill the spiritual essence of a place in a moment in time; The ‘distillation’ might come through a series of rapid watercolor sketches done on site, which are later worked up in the studio. Or it might come from a memory bank of landscapes ‘ingested’ by the subconscious which emerges as the painting proceeds. In either case, the images that appear are subliminal; the subconscious abstracts the natural. The painting process is an attempt to capture these key moments of ingestion and then to decode them, recreating each landscape's ‘secret essence.’ The viewpoint is unchanging; the viewer is confronted by the infinity of space and time between air and water or land. Connection with solid land is minimal and man’s influence is absent: we are suspended and free — as at the end/beginning or beginning/end.” The enigma of Julia Harris is that she is a master watercolorist yet her command of painting with acrylics is powerful, lush and luminous. She also has a wide breadth of subjects — from architectural details of cities like Venice, Rome and London — to her smaller, focused yet free tree portraits to more abstracted, ethereal renderings of sky, clouds, land and water. Standing before her awesome painting “Muskoka, Sultry Afternoon” and “Hemisphere,” we are transported, taken to a place of planetary reverence, observing the elements, embraced by light and atmospheric wonder.

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