Sandstone Painting

Julius grew up in South Africa in a small country town on the Highveld. Impressions of the Highveld light and landscape have always underlined and informed his work. He studied painting and printmaking in Cape Town in the early 1970s. He left South Africa at that time chiefly because of the oppressive Apartheid regime and relocated to London where he continued his post graduate studies at Central St Martin’s School of Art. Julius has been fortunate to have worked in several countries, including South Africa, England, France and latterly Australia. He has maintained a working studio throughout his artmaking. He has exhibited in London, Brighton and Cape Town. Julius has always found his inspiration in landscape and the natural world. While most of his work is not directly representational and is in fact purely abstract it is always informed by the immediate visual world. For example, his recent work is directly influenced by the ocean and the sandstone cliffs of the eastern seaboard of Australia. Julius has lived in Australia for close to 20 years after immigrating from London. He loves the physical feeling of living in the southern hemisphere. The huge skies, the beautiful birds, the towering gum tress, the pristine blue Pacific Ocean. And especially the immediacy and physicality of nature and how instantly accessible and tangible it is. All this resonates with his experiences of the landscape and natural world where he grew up. His main influences in painting range from the Cubists - especially Juan Gris - through to Kandinsky, the Russian Constructivists, the American Abstract Expressionists, the Process painters of the 60’s including Mark Rothko, Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, and his late friends and colleagues the South African artists Kevin Atkinson and Trevor Goss, amongst others. Julius is currently working on a series of paintings where the challenge investigates disrupting the notion of composition, and within a structured palette exploring the way in which a consistently used painting process reveals the image. In exploring process in painting Julius is interested in chance occurrences, much as this occurs in nature, for example the way the paint performs under structured conditions. These paintings are ultimately inspired by the natural world. Julius Has exhibited widely in South Africa, the UK, France and Australia.