Julia Flanagan is an artist who works across painting, sculpture, textiles and drawing. Born in Newcastle, Julia moved to Sydney to study Painting and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School in 2004 and her Painting Honours in 2005.
Her unstructured and playful paintings and drawings begin with the random placing of small geometric shapes. These form the bones of the piece and enable her to compose the drawing through connecting pencil lines. Her fascination with patterns and colour stems from a background in textiles making and design. The pieced together shapes within her work allude to the many scraps of material found in the studio and reference the decorative arts, in particular the Gees Bend quilt makers of Alabama, as well as shapes and patterns observed in daily travels through her suburban environment. For Flanagan, the repetitiveness of the mark making and pattern painting are calming and hypnotic. Her interest is in creating a sense of harmony within colour arrangements, looking at how colours can relate to one another, vibrate and glow. Working in an improvised way, she seeks to create pieces that are mischievous and unconventional, works that thrive on the play between different colour combinations.