About the Artist

Growing up in the outer suburbs of London, wild places were in scarce supply so I found creative inspiration on trips to the Atlantic coast of France each summer. Living in that salt-sodden landscape led to a love of weathered surfaces, from warped and swollen timber to paint peeling from corroded steel. When I moved to Oxford in 2014, I maintained a connection to the elements by swimming in the rivers around the city, and water remains a recurring theme in my work.

My paintings explore the sensation of immersion - in water, music, or memory - and the shaping qualities of water. Alongside water-based paints, i use natural materials (stone dust, sand, chalk, salt, iron and copper powders), and I’m interested in the evolution of a painting as a gradual process, with the end-destination changing as the journey progresses.

I love grappling with the paint's tendency to ignore guidelines, so I use techniques and materials to make the flow of the paint less predictable. I want to explore the spaces that fall outside clear definition or explanation, and when I'm making work I'm usually seeking an image that is ambiguous, something that can't be pinned down.

When I see a painting I like, I always look at the edge of the canvas to see if there are clues about how it came to be, snippets of an earlier version. The drips of the paint, the accidental smudges, can contain as much poetry as the central image. I’m interested in what is beyond the edge, what is underneath when paint is scraped away, what is revealed when a veneer is peeled off.

I received my Masters in Fine Art from Oxford Brookes in 2021, and was awarded the MFA Fine Art Prize for Outstanding Achievement. My undergraduate degree was in Classics, from Cambridge University. I have also worked for many years in development and fundraising for Oxford and Cambridge, and was a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.

Get in touch

No question too large or small – contact me if you’d like to know more. I’d love to hear from you.

Arrange a studio visit

I’m based in central Oxford at OVADA studios. Get in touch if you’d like to visit and view my work, or if you’d like to talk about a collaboration.

Commission a painting

My paintings range from £150 to £5,000. If you’re thinking about whether to commission something, contact me and we can chat about how it could work.

julia.thaxton.artist@gmail.com
@thaxart on instagram