About Julea Hope Boswell

Discovery

Julea Hope Boswell is an award-winning Canadian artist based in Ottawa and Prince Edward Island. She has also lived in Toronto, Edmonton and Berlin.

Growing up on PEI, Julea's expressive outlets included visual and performing arts — and she has been creating art ever since. After an early career in dance, she added over 20 years of marketing, public engagement and arts management experience to her multifaceted accomplishments. This included with the City of Ottawa Cultural Development team and Propeller Dance Company. As a visual artist, Boswell continues to evolve and expand a diverse portfolio of textile art and paintings in which movement and the dynamic energy of tides, waves and shorelines are recurring themes. She has also collaborated artistically with dance artists of diverse bodies and minds, as well as musicians, composers and poets.

Julea's art has been exhibited in NYC, Toronto, Ottawa, and Maritime galleries, in performance and site-specific events, and in collections internationally. She is a City of Ottawa Artist Grant recipient and sits on art award and exhibit juries.

Julea has an MBA (Telfer School, University of Ottawa), a BFA in Visual Art, with distinction (Thompson Rivers University, BC) and a Diploma in Theatre, Dance (Toronto Metropolitan University).

As a visual artist Julea Hope Boswell sees the world around her as a mood-boosting dance that she puts into paint. Julea's primary influences include her involvement in art, dance, music and theatre from a young age, and growing up surrounded by the ocean on beautiful Prince Edward Island. She is moved by the power of all kinds of art to spread joy, bring people together and to inspire her own creativity. Using a kinetic and tactile process of discovery, Boswell captures the energy and emotions sparked by interflowing themes of nature, dance and music to create uplifting lyrical and nature-based abstracts. Full of movement and colour, fluorescent and metallic paints often add a special vibrancy to her paintings.

Working to music, Julea moves her paintings freely from wall to floor to table as she progresses. Instead of brushes she primarily uses palette knives and rags to apply, blend and erase acrylic paint, and uses these same tools (in addition to brushes) in her watercolour process. As a finishing touch, she uses squirt bottles to embellish her work with improvisational loops and splashes.

"Wow! Such colour and freedom. I love your expression of movement." - solo show visitor

”The paint dances across the canvas.” - viewer's comment

"I’ve seen ten thousand waves on canvas in my lifetime and none are as evocative as this. Exquisite." - Facebook comment

“A breath of fresh air! Breezy. It has such a lightness and positivity that make it pretty irresistible." - Instagram follower

"Your joyful work is exactly what the world needs!" - Artwork Archive blog author

Julea Hope Boswell

Frenchfort, PEI & , Ottawa, ON

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Contact: [email protected]