Where Are You?
Dimensions: triptych
Medium: oil on canvas
Where Are You?
Artist: Juliette McCullough
Biography of Juliette McCullough ( b. 1945, British )
Juliette McCullough was born and grew up in England where she received her education which culminated in her post graduate study at The Royal Academy of Arts London. Her most important and influential artist teachers were Maurice de Sauzmarez at the Byam Shaw School, Roderick Barrett at the Royal Academy and Euan Uglow, Henry Inlander and Robert Medley at Camberwell School of Art and Craft. She also studied for one year in Munich with Adolph Hartmann.
She has exhibited extensively in Britain, and the U.S.A., as well as in Italy and Japan. Her work is in corporate and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. At the end of her graduate studies in London she was singled out by having one of her paintings bought by Francis Bacon.
Juliette makes her home in Dallas Texas where she continues her painting and teaching work. Most recently she received The Moss Chumley Award from the Meadows Museum of Art. This prestigious award is given annually to an outstanding North Texas Artist who has exhibited professionally for at least ten years and who has a proven track record as an active community advocate for the Visual Arts.
Artist Statement
My work as an artist and teacher has spanned my life lived on both sides of the Atlantic so far. My environment becomes part of me as I move through it, but my artistic language remains deeply rooted in the traditions of European painting.
I have a need to make images about people and the human condition, but representational goals alone never satisfy me. I find myself searching for a core archetypal energy that informs the subject matter of the image below its representational surface. It is for this reason I often work away from reality, preferring to pull my imagery from memory and imagination.
With the human experience as my immediate subject matter, my fascination is with our instinctual energies which unconsciously drive so many of our actions. This marvelous animal nature connects us to the earth and to our beginnings. It lies thinly veiled behind our sophisticated behaviors, and yet remains the dynamo that drives our human lives. I find that those archetypal energies that I seek in visual form can sometimes best be expressed through animal imagery.
Through my invented animals, and human forms I am able to connect with, to claim, and to understand something of those less conscious energies.
The organic process of growth within the development of each image always plays between the polarities of abstraction and figuration with the figurative elements always ultimately winning out. However, most recently I have found that sometimes working from some reference can give me the tools that I need for a more conceptual kind of expression. As a result I find that I am creating two kinds of imagery, one immediate, intuitive and expressive; the other a more analytical, realistic and controlled vehicle or conduit for those conscious and less conscious drives.