I Followed the Sun

Julie Burdis followed her dream, coming to Australia and developing her artistic talents.

Born in Yorkshire 1943, I displayed some artistic talent throughout my schooling and my teachers suggested I might think about art school. But I wanted to follow the sun and after seeing the film ‘A Town Like Alice’, decided that would be a good start and at the age of 18 had saved up enough to buy a passage on a boat to Australia.

Alice was more than everything I had hoped for and I knew instantly I was a desert person. The stunning colours and vistas of the inland in the midst of a drought reiterated my desire to paint, and those scenes remained in my head throughout leaving Alice seven times for good, before finally settling there in my 30s when I began to dabble with paint.

I felt I did very badly and wondered why I wanted to paint so badly if I could only paint badly!

I chose watercolour, thinking it to be the simplest medium, Ha! I bought all the cheapest paints, paper and brushes, and it took several years to understand my ineptitude using these poor tools.

I had also been introduced to clay and was experiencing more success with it. I concentrated more on that for a while.

TAFE opened up a two-year introductory course in art when I was 40 (and 40 was nowhere near as old as I thought it would be!) and this helped unblock many blockages between my wrist and head.

I can’t get past Leonardo Da Vinci being my favourite artist, but enjoy and admire many other artists’ works. I rarely warm to abstract but love the work of Marcus Rothko. I am in awe of sculptors who together with composers, I feel are at the top of the art pile. I commend the strains of Bruchs’ violin concerto for painting to.