Julia Crane
ARTIST
"There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read ABC may read our natures"
Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici)
"Artist"?......
"Well at least she can draw" were the words my 7yr old self heard while I was eaves dropping on a conversation between my folks, following a parents evening at my local school.
My Teacher terrified me, she was constantly dreaming up tests and games. One happened every Monday morning...a hat full of numbers and we had to pull out a number and recite the times tables forward and back and any pause or hesitation was met with a "whack"! from her ruler.
She had the same method with Art and drawing, "Draw it again...whack! Draw it again ..whack! But when it comes to drawing you can see if something is a good representation of something...so as I approached her desk for the 5th time and yet again..watched her tear up my drawing with a disaproving whack! the penny dropped and I knew it was nothing to do with me.
Every experience, good or bad teaches us something and this unhappy lady taught me that when it came to Art, I had confidence, and no matter how many times she hit me, scribbled over or tore up my drawings she couldn't take away my confidence.
Somehow in spite of her behaviour, when it came to drawing I felt like I was connecting to something bigger, like something was protecting me, hard to explain, I just felt "safe".
My work space, with plenty of natural daylight.
Gallery 503
Petersfield
A painting of two penguins in a snow scape. My Client had seen a photo in a gallery in New York and fallen in love with it. The photographer had apparently waited for hours in minus temperatures when suddenly two little penguins appeared together walking out of a snowy mist and he got his photo. My challenge was to replicate it on a very large scale!
I decided to work on a textured wood surface, I started with acrylics but struggled and almost gave up. Then i started using oils and it was a different story and I've been using oils for large works ever since.
