​​​​​​​Julia Ball

“I want painting to be quite contemplative, really.  That, for me, is its function.”  — Julia Ball

 

Julia began her career working as a printmaker and continued to produce prints and etchings for most of her career, even after her main focus became working in oils. Her subject was the natural world – be it a hedge in winter, the flowers of the Burren, a rainy day or the sea.  She returned again and again to certain key locations such as Quay Fen outside Cambridge and the north Norfolk coast as well as exploring other places on holiday or for prolonged stays such as at Kentmere, in Cumbria. She usually worked outside and then took these beginnings home to explore them further. She also had a period of exploring the female body in a coastal landscape and produced work inspired by her political engagement with the women’s movement and the peace movement.  For example, her Grunwick series and work inspired by marching to, and demonstrating at, Greenham Common.  Every day, for more than seven decades, she meticulously recorded changing light and colour noting it by the hour sometimes and then explored through pastel, pencil, grids, collage and paint before starting work on her larger canvases. She began representationally and then gradually distilled the colour and light relationships until she arrived at the balance she sought.  She worked applying thin layers of colour onto her canvases over many weeks or months.  Her studio was full of small painted squares of canvas, board and sheets of paper where she had built up colours and then noted each paint used.  Her sketchbooks are full of questions about how to truly represent what she saw and about how to really look.  She requires us to give her work our full, slow attention otherwise we will miss the subtlety and power of her endeavour.