Dr Julie Anne Denton

I have been making art since I was about six. I used to pause the video player and draw the Disney characters in my mothers notebook. My parents didn't realise I had talent until a tradesman spotted the drawings in her notebook whilst she was trying to find a page to write down his number and he told her how good they were. After that my skill was encouraged. I entered and won competitions, some even thought I was cheating and an adult had made the drawing instead of me.
 
I come from the Isle of Man and we owned a hotel and then a lodging house on Douglas Promenade. I was allowed to paint the lodging house rooms with funny acid men. I painted the front and side outside walls of the hotel with Disney characters when I was nine and three quarters. When I was 14 my mother took me to Liverpool to busk on the streets drawing an Iron Maiden poster 'The Trooper'.
 
It was obvious I would forge a career in the arts. I discovered glass as my medium when I was eighteen and I became hooked to the process. I liked that no matter how dark my work was in theme, it always looked deceptively beautiful when created in glass. As a young artist I used my art to deal with the emotional difficulties I experienced with my family and my personal experiences - One could almost call these issues my 'muse'.
 
As I got over these emotional matters I turned to philosophy, poetry and literature to calm me. This faze inspired a number of years of artworks based on the works of artists such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Hieronymus Bosch, Turner, Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley. I didn't ever want to make artwork about political matters because I felt then and I still feel now, that artists should relay a truth to the viewer. How I relate to poetry or my emotions is a truth, but I did not feel competent to reveal any truths about political or world issues - Excepting religion of course, a subject in which I am well versed.
 
Now in my practice I am interested in nature and heritage. Specifically the two subjects I am exploring at the moment are the representation of conscious/unconscious thought, and the use of the Fibonacci sequence as a tool to explore beauty in sculpture. Currently I am beginning to turn my glass artworks into bronzes, and in the future I see myself becoming more and more at one with myself and those around me. This journey I have undertaken is a quest for inner peace and wisdom. I am not sure I will ever truly understand the complexities of why humans do what they do, but I suspect I will understand enough about the actions of humans to leave that subject and move towards a pure pursuit of beauty through art.
 
I can't tell you what distinguishes me from other artists, I am simply myself.