Julia Burton         Collage & Painting

About Julia

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​​I’d had a love of photography from a very early age and started making collages using my images and found pictures from magazines in the late '80s.  It was really through the making of collages, finding weird and wonderful imagery and my love of vivid colour that I eventually started evening classes in painting which led to a Textile degree at Chelsea College of Art & Design in the early '90s.

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At Chelsea I created a collection of hand-painted, screen printed silk scarves.  My work as a textile designer took me to Lake Como in Italy where I was fortunate to work for Mantero, one of the world's leading textile design studios, designing ties for the likes of Salvatore Ferragamo, Longchamps & Ermenegildo Zegna.  I then worked in a small studio in London, eventually freelancing and selling my work all over the world.

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In 2005 I started painting in oils, but it wasn’t until I met Phillippa Clayden who taught me the language of painting, that my love of both collage and painting came together and I began to create weird and wonderful fantasy worlds.

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For the past 15 years my artwork has been focused on painting, collage and mixed media.  I work intuitively and am driven by the physical process of painting, gesture and the expressive potential of colour.  The inspiration for my work comes from my subconscious and the textured surface of the canvas where I see memories, dreams and elements of everyday life, the possible and the impossible. 

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Full of texture, colour and ethereal imagery.  The process can be quite a painful journey, slowly teasing out the story, pulling things forward pushing things back and watching how each painting evolves….. as a result the viewer is invited inward toward something beyond the surface, deep within the painting, and within themselves.

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