Julie Grantz

Working as a contemporary realist, Julie creates narrative, large-scale, monochromatic, figurative work in charcoal and pastel. The intent of her work is to revisit her own past experiences as a way to process past events, as well as to challenge viewers’ hidden bias and preconceptions against women, as a way to elevate, and empower the women whom are her subjects. 

Julie sees her drawings as a channel for the heroic spirit of her childhood, younger self, and mother self to emerge, while also exploring the duality of spirit, purpose and identity within herself. Julie considers herself to be in service to her drawings as they are her means of processing trauma, and give her a voice she has been previously unable to access. 

The experience of learning create narrative work is a journey, through which Julie believes you can only think you know what path to take, but is something you can really only find along the way. She meticulously plans her pieces, with wardrobe, lighting, and intention, but in the moments of creating finds new means for creating her voice that become part of the work in a way she could never have planned. She has created a number of self portraits because she has an idea of a moment, a feeling, an experience that she wants to visually portray, but doesn’t know how to pull these things out of the world, except through re-enacting it herself, in the way that she saw and felt in the original moments. Her large scale works require the dedication of hundreds of hours in actual execution, by pushing and pulling dry medium into and out of heavy cotton fiber based printmaking paper which Julie sees as, and calls sculpting, even though the pieces are two-dimensional 

Julie has studied drawing with sanded charcoal and pastel for 2 years. Her studio is in Alameda, California, United States, where she lives with her son, dog and two cats. She has worked professionally as a Graphic Designer for almost 20 years, and when her son started elementary school decided to try to learn to draw because she was interested in trying to tell her own stories visually.