James
Lee
Julier
Bio
James Julier is a UK artist who graduated Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge with a Study of Art and Printmaking BA Combined Honours. He has become a popular proponent of digital art through his YouTube landscape painting tutorials and with many millions of views, he has an ever growing subscriber base there and elsewhere.
Though his sensibilities and foundations lie in the traditional art disciplines of painting, drawing and printmaking, he now exclusively works in the digital realm, specifically on iPad with Apple Pencil.
Yielding
I aim to inspire other aspiring artists, wherever they are on their own artistic journey, by example, as well as helping them build their technical vocabulary in order to express their own visions.
His personal work has its genesis in abstract forms, but his work then develops the tangible clarity of realism through his use of light, texture and colour, inspired mainly by the natural environment. It is his passion for the natural world that pushes his personal surreal work forwards, but also gives him the motivation to teach and inspire others as teacher and artist.
Incandescent
If I were to summon up a deity to represent the natural world, I’d picture her as a fiery passionate yet controlled mix of incandescent creation and destruction…
I believe strongly in the value and importance of populist art within culture, work that can be accessed by anyone with eyes to see. If the reaction to work is 'That's weird" or 'those insect-like textures disturb me!' then I find this preferable to the pretence that a work/artist has elicited an emotional response due to its officially sanctioned 'worthy' status.
Joseph Campbell's term 'Aesthetic arrest,' broadly covers my aim, an avoidance at trying to persuade the viewer of anything, a 'raised above desire and loathing' state where simply the act of looking is a rewarding experience.
In Deep
It was the act of looking closely at nature that inspired my imagination as a child and continues to do so.
The hidden worlds of anatomy and nature, often at a macro level, have always called to me as fertile landscapes of discovery. New colour combinations, textures and forms, alien yet completely natural macro terrain.