After working as a stained glass artist for a few years, Julie Cooper studied Fine Art (BA Hons) at St. Albans School of Art, now the University of Hertfordshire.

She lives in Herefordshire on the Welsh borders.

"Painting, for me, is a necessary and essential mode of expression. A way of interpreting our increasingly complex world and communicating a response to it.

"Landscape, nature, architectural heritage, music, relationships; all can inform the paintings but each painting then becomes a journey; an accumulation of thoughts, emotions, questions, encounters.

"By laying down colour, making marks with a brush, knife, rags, fingers or scraping back to reveal under layers until finally reaching a sense of an ending. Sometimes the process can take many years of tweaking, reworking. Other times the painting is resolved in a matter of days.

"It is often a surprise to see the end result - it comes from such a deep place inside oneself."

Paintings are there to be experienced - they are events.

Paintings are not to be reasoned with,

they are not to be understood.

They are there to be recognised.

They are the equivalent of nature,

not an illustration of it. 

Robert Motherwell