Visual Artist- Painter, West Cork, Ireland
instagram: @juliamitchellpainting
PAINTINGS
2024 - 2022
During 2022 I relocated with my family to Schull in West Cork. The beautiful Mizen peninsula, the evocative coastline and mountains have become a current focus and vehicle to explore different responses evoked by the surrounding environment and our relationship to it. Paintings from 2023 reflect an ongoing interest in the historical past embedded in the landscape.
2021
These paintings document personal encounters with ancient Irish stone tools, medieval sculptures, bas reliefs and tomb effigies from ancient Irish abbeys. My relocation from South Africa to Ireland in 2016 necessitated the building of new visceral and sensory connections and a more expansive sense of temporality. Resonating with stones has been the unexpected key to this process. During lockdown we visited Kilcooley Abbey in County Tipperary. It is a wonderful medieval monastic site with disarmingly beautiful carvings, including those of a mermaid, a dolphin and a burial sculpture of a knight with his dog at his feet. Self- and family portraits found their way into the images and the Knight painting was shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize. In October my interest in medieval sculpture was facilitated through a residency at The Burren College of Art, County Clare and visits to surrounding medieval sites. Lastly, an ongoing series of mix media works exploring visceral responses to the ancient finely-shaped stone tools unearthed in our garden.
2020
The paintings below were largely concerned with the theme of moving from one place to another, in my case from South Africa to Ireland. Serendipitous that I was invited to take part in an exhibition themed Diaspora.
COMINGS AND GOINGS
In Comings and Goings, the themes of movement and transitoriness are explored through the image of the table where a still life is in disorder. The theme explores possibilities for different kinds of celebrations. These paintings are also about light and colour, quirkiness and liveliness. Birds make unexpected appearances.
COLLECTIONS
The second theme of Collections has to do with personal treasures and the memories they hold. It includes the idea of packing and unpacking, storing and preserving. Treasures can help to keep memories in view, providing a sense of continuity and familiarity despite change.
OBJECT RELATIONS
The third theme of Object Relations explores human relations and dynamics between families and groups visually, using still life objects and the spaces between them, to explore hierarchies, closeness, separation and absence. This theme was Inspired by Morandi’s still-lifes and psychodynamic ‘Object Relations theory’.
SANCTUARIES
The fourth theme of Sanctuaries is about spaces which are experienced as safe hiding places to escape into, to reflect and to be re-newed through nature. Bonnard is the main inspiration in painting these kinds of spaces.
BIOGRAPHY
Julia Mitchell lives in Schull in beautiful West Cork Ireland. She moved with her family to Ireland in 2016. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Julia has been painting for over thirty years working mainly in oils on canvases. She has worked especially within and between the genres of landscape, portraiture and still-life, inspired by the many beautiful places she has called home, in Cape Town, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Grahamstown, White River and now Ireland. These places, together with the accumulation of experiences and memories along the way, have worked their way into the paintings. Taking time to study psychology has been an enriching experience, leading to new understandings of her own work, and the processes of artmaking in the mental health context. This interest led to a PhD on the artmaking experiences of studio-based art groups which she co-facilitated at a psychiatric hospital in Grahamstown, South Africa. Living in Ireland, new paintings include portraiture combined with historical sites and artifacts in explorations to find connections across broader dimensions of time and space.
CONTACT ME
7 Ard Chleire, Schull, County Cork, P81N526, Ireland
00353874584998