About Julia’s art

I was born and brought up in the pleasant, though unremarkable countryside of Northamptonshire. Introduced to Art by my artist and teacher father, Hubert Pack, I learned to explore places and objects through a fascination with drawing from an early age. The search for the right mark, the feel of the pencil, pen or paint and the emotion stirred by the view or object often being more important than the final image.

My formal Art education was mainly at Bretton Hall College. Architecture, landscape and rhythms of the seasons influence my interest in the constant change and patina of my surroundings. I find a sense of quietness and serenity in observing the small changes and weathering of life, which gives an honest beauty to things rather than making them pretty, brash or garish.

My Christian faith is important in how I see the world and how I respond through my Artwork. Hugh Lorimer commented that ‘what the artist is expressing is not himself but his response to the external continuing process of Creation.’ My work does not aim to ‘copy’ so much as to develop qualities from my observations into something that has its own aesthetic life. For this reason I often layer work with different images from a place, working backwards and forwards through a piece as I seek the mark, colour, contrast, line or space that best expresses my response.

I find a resonance in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, where the aesthetics of imperfection, patina and understated elegance are more pleasing, interesting and revealing of structure and process than the qualities of perfection, surface and finish.

I love looking at Art and have been influenced by many, many artists from Paul Cezanne and John Piper in student days to Andrew Wyeth and Anselm Kiefer and more recently Kurt Jackson and Michael Honnor. Kiefer’s Palmsonntag at the Baltic was something I could have looked at forever. The textures, muted tones and layered collage of the individual pieces were infinitely fascinating and made a very powerful installation with the huge palm tree spread across the floor.

Much of my recent work I have termed ‘Poems of Place’ in that I aim to find a succinct expression for all the qualities, experience and emotion of a place. My sources have to have something special, but that doesn’t have to be anything spectacular; an afternoon in the sun in the garden, rain on a window, seaweed on the beach are what I want to connect with through Art. Whilst I love majestic and magnificent places such as the Canadian Rockies or the Grand Canyon it is the texture of the local cornfield or the weathering of a doorway that inspire my work. The sense of seeking out and finding something ‘beautiful’ in the everyday and expressing it in a mark was a quality I sought to explore with students through teaching Art; why copy the already beautiful when you can add to the aesthetics of the world by finding and making something that adds to that aesthetic?

I currently live, work and dog walk in Nottinghamshire, another unremarkable but infinitely interesting and beautiful place.