Julie Roberts

Julie Roberts (born 12 September 1963) is a Welsh painter who works in acrylics, oils and watercolours. Taught at the Wrexham School of Art, Saint Martin's School of Art and the Glasgow School of Art, she used medical equipment and furniture in her early works before moving on to include deceased humans, dolls and mannequins in her paintings. Roberts has done group or solo exhibitions in several major American and European cities and her works are held in the public or private collections of various museums.

Early life and education On 12 September 1963, Roberts was born in Flint, North Wales, United Kingdom. She and her three siblings briefly spent some periods of time in foster care and children's homes as a consequence of her father being an alcoholic before being reunited with her birth family. She was interested in feminism and the works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. such as in the 1992 work Obstetrics and Gynaecology Couch. She painted the study and desk of Sigmund Freud in multiple paintings in 1996, and of some famous individuals on their deathbeds. Roberts made the 2006 work called The Good Wife taken from 1930s manuals on how to be a good housewife. That same year, she used photographs of the Glasgow School of Art of female students in the 1900s drawing and painting in multiple places for the oil painting Girls Painting (The Drawing Lesson). The series partly paid tribute to Charles Rennie Mackintosh's building and to the school's progressive attitude towards women students at the 20th century's commencement. In 2010, she made a series of paintings reminiscent of children's books and instruction manuals taken from historical archives on children under constraints, estranged from normal family life or displaced.

Analysis Roberts paints in acrylics, oils and watercolours. According to Catherine M. Grant in Grove Art Online, Roberts used "a graphic style in which an object, painted from a photograph, is depicted floating against a monochromatic background". In Roberts' early career, humans were not featured in her works before introducing deceased bodies, dolls and mannequins. Ken Johnson of The New York Times observed that she "applies paint in tastefully muted hues so thickly it is as if she is frosting a cake. In so doing, she abstracts the imagery to sweetly cartoonish effect." The List's Alexander Kennedy wrote Roberts produced "images that manage to capture something of the difficulty that women artists feel when confronted with the ‘boys club’ mentality that surrounds painting, without making this explicit or the reductive justification for her work."