Julia Maleeva was born in Bulgaria. After receiving a BA in Fine Arts and a MA in Architecture, she went to the US where she completed her postgraduate specialisation in Architectural Heritage in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her graphics and sketches can be seen in the US Library of Congress.
After a successful career as an architect, Julia now focuses on painting from her studio in Bristol where she has lived for the last 16 years. She takes inspiration from her travels around the hilltop villages of Provence, the Bulgarian coast and fishing villages in Cornwall.
'I’ve been inspired with the characters and memories of old houses for as long as I can remember. I think I have a kind of romantic relationship with my objects, sometimes they are sad and mysterious, the next day they smile and are telling me stories. A theatre play without an interval, only interrupted by the buzzing of the bees.'
Julia explores her subjects in an involved process of painting, drawing and applying wax to the surface. Exploring the two-dimensional relationship with form, colour and texture has always been her main interest the challenge is to maintain the right balance between graphic lines and colours.
'My art is a deconstruction process of layers of paint waiting to be scraped and then layered back in a different perspective, just to show something more interesting. To me, going backwards discovers a unique story, like a detective game to find clues from the past.
I use cold wax as one of the main ingredients in my paintings, which allows me to create unique textures. Working only with palette knives, I often add to the pre-mixed oil/wax substance - Cornish sand, chopped sea weeds, old tea leaves or just scrapes of old paint from my palette. The whole scraping process takes my imagination to reuse everything again into the painting and be able to create a kind of sustainable art. Small bobbles are one of my signatures, made from scrapes and different mixtures.'