SOLD - Julie d’Aubigny - La Maupin 1670 - 1707 Painting

I began producing elaborate mixed media pieces while on my long stay in Venice, making use of the city-floor ephemera of discarded museum leaflets and postcards. Incorporating ‘scraps’ of the past, sourced from secondhand books and magazines, and the maps I grew up with as the child of an intrepid Geophysicist, I produced a diary of sorts, the alternative reality of a history I invented for myself. I have since developed this way of working, often inspired by current events, creating ‘intricate scenes of social malfunction’, my investigations into ‘the human condition’ through a series of imagined portraits. I studied Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University, spending my final year at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago on an extended travel award. Graduating in 1992 I moved back to London, where for a time I slipped into the world of graphic design and illustration, working for Raymond Loewy International, and subsequently becoming Course Tutor at Lambeth College, and later a lecturer at Worcester University. By the late 1990s, emboldened to pursue my painting career by formidable gallery owner and art advocate the late Elizabeth Organ, a series of events shaped my subsequent work, beginning with the move from London to unfeasibly feudal Herefordshire, a turbulent marriage in a ‘Gormenghast’ of a castle, and a subsequent period of exile in Venice. My work has most recently been shown at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol and the Mernier Gallery, London, with an increasing following of private European collectors from Southern France to Croatia.