Julia was born in Bulgaria. After receiving her BA in Fine Arts and MA in Architecture, she went to the USA where she completed Postgraduate specialisation in Architectural Heritage in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her graphics and sketches can be seen in the US Library of Congress.

After a successful career as an architect, she now focuses on painting from her straw bales built studio in Hampshire. She takes inspiration from her travels around the hilltop villages of Provence, Bulgarian Black Sea coast and the fishermen’s villages in Cornwall, with their special distinctive light, scent and textures.

Julia explores her subjects in an involved process of painting, drawing and applying wax to the surface. Exploring two-dimensional relationship with form, colour and texture has always been her main interest. The challenge is to maintain the right balance between graphic lines and colours.

“My art is a deconstruction process of layers of paint waiting to be scraped and then layered back in a different perspective, just to show something more interesting. To me, the way to go backwards discovers a unique story, like a detective game to find clues from the past.

I use cold wax as one of the main ingredients in my paintings, which allows me to create unique textures. Working only with palette knives I often add to the premixed oil/wax substance – Cornish sand, chopped sea weeds, old tea leaves or just scrapes of old paint from my palette. The whole scraping process takes my imagination to reuse everything again into the painting and be able to create a kind of sustainable art. I am ultimately on a journey to create a new fusion of dry point and oil painting, wrapped in cold wax.”