"Julie’s parents were part of the Jewish diaspora that fled Nazi Germany to settle in Britain. That almost genetic instinct for survival so often built on the unspoken memory, the unfilled desires are never far from Julie’s poetic work. The German word Sehnsucht literally translates as 'Longing', or 'Desire', and seems to be the very essence that drives her brushes to tell her pictorial stories with poignant depth and colour.

"Julie’s own survival is so connected to her lifetime of painting. When others were watching the 1966 World Cup, Julie was lying on the landing of her family home, drawing her first self-portrait with her first box of coloured wax crayons. It was that moment she recalls knowing that being a painter is all she ever wanted to be. It was eight years later accompanying her much loved parents to an Edvard Munch show at The Hayward Gallery that Julie began to fully realise that paintings could convey feelings more powerfully than words, with a drama that great music aspires to. These then rarely seen works communicated with a forceful voice tearing at Julie's own teenage feelings about her mother who was tragically disappearing into illness. Munch’s works with their series of interlocking shapes and colours spoke to his philosophy 'I do not paint what I see but what I saw.

"Drawing is central to her practise. Drawing directly from observation both for its own sake and in order to collect information for paintings and then drawing from memories too: 'Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye… it also includes the inner picture of the soul' (Munch).

"Julie's profound happiness in painting is so very alive in this small colour bursting collection of her work. It is her artist's understanding of her role as the ever present outsider looking in, finding the entry points through many different interlocking layers, in order to reveal the whole picture. These pictures read like poems scan. I am reminded of the accentual metre of T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land 'Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. / Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.'

"'Gardens, trees, plants,' says Julie, 'embody and reflect elements that mirror ourselves as human beings: roots, mythologies, diversity, mutability, and connections. Thus presenting endless possibilities to examine and capture in their representation.'

"Julie draws her inspiration from Titian, Rembrandt, Bonnard, Matisse and, of course, Munch. A colourist, an expressionist, a symbolist, all of those for sure; but most of all a 'Julie Heldist' which she might describe as 'beauty, magic, sehnsucht', and one of her favourites words, 'stuff'."

- Nick Crean, January 2021

Julie Held (b. 1958) studied at Camberwell School of Art 1977-81. She was awarded The Picker Fellow in Painting in 1981, and subsequently attended The Royal Academy School’s post-graduate diploma programme. She has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, with solo shows including Eleven Spitalfields; Mercer Chance Gallery, Hoxton; The Piccadilly Gallery, Cork Street; and The Boundary Gallery, London. Group shows have included The London Group, The National Portrait BP Portrait Award in 2013, and the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition – in which her work has been featured six times (2009, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2019, 2020).

Julie’s work is based on observation and memory; her compositions are notable for their vivid use of colour, and a style that blends the figurative and the abstract. ‘My work is mediated through time,’ she notes. ‘Subject and content either coincide or diverge, and I use multiple medias to give expression to these concepts in my work.’

Held teaches at The Royal Drawing Schools.  She is a member of The London Group and she was made a member of The Aborealists in 2018.  Her work is in public collections nationwide and abroad.