4 Julia Ciccarone

 

Prof. Julia Ciccarone is an enchanting painter from Melbourne, Australia. She was given a grant to live and paint in Italy, by the Visual Arts and Craft Board of the Australia Council. She also worked with  Arts Victoria in the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies. She's won the Melbourne Savage Club's Invitation Art Prize for Painting, and was a finalist for the Archibald Prize in portraiture. She also co-wrote and produced a short film, 67, directed by Kasimir Burgess. The film won a Crystal Bear at the Berlin Int. Film Festival. She currently teaches at the Western Institute of Technology and Monash University.

'Grounded'

Julia was born in Melbourne. She earned her BFA from the Victorian College of Arts there.

Although she paints portrait commissions, Julie's personal work is far more exciting. You might not know it by seeing just one work - you'd think it's just a highly skilled, realistic scene of some unimportant, albiet beautiful place. But, when you see it all together, that's when you realize something strange is taking place. These works don't just show a few random places - they're snapshots in a larger story, a fantastic lucid dream where the main character is you, as seen from outside yourself. Julie plays with ideas of déjà vu, changes of place and time, repeating objects that serve as inscrutable symbols, as her protagonist/s journey forth, carrying items who knows where, or for what reason. There's that same pensive stress of having to do something, to get somewhere that we've all experienced in dreams. Taken as a whole, you realize Julie isn't so much painting as world building, in the same manner as painter Andrea Kowch, or the writer Stephen King.

According to this article by Susan McCulloch (The Australian, 1996), Julie was inspired by two books to make many of her paintings: Yew Discovery of Terra Australis by Gabriel de Foigny, and The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Poltock. Both were written in 17th century Europe, and imagine the uncharted land of Australia, as a place of fantasy, like a Garden of Eden, where strange creatures, including winged people, live together in harmony, free from the strict rules and conformity of Europe.

Juliaciccarone.com

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'Leave the Way I Came'

'(Untitled Phone Booth)'

'Formaldehyde'

'Connection'

'Shelter'

'Incommunicado'

'Study for Rite of Passage 3'

'The Package'

'Work'

'Going Home'

'It's All Becoming Clear Now'

'Collection'

'Liminal'

'Ninth Wave'

'Threshold'

'Displaced'

'Visions Are Hard to Find'

'Fell'

'Portal'

'Discovery'

'Mesmerised'

'Portrait of Nicholas Jones'

'Portrait of Ross Gillies, QC'