Beach hut studios brings you Julie Stead

Julie is a Cape Town based artist, specializing in large oil portraits of African women and children, seascapes and, more recently, wildlife.

Born in Johannesburg, Julie completed her Fine Arts degree at Pietermaritzburg University. She was offered an opportunity to work in the IT industry and ended up being there for many years. It wasn’t until her move to Cape Town in 2010 that she rediscovered her passion for painting.

Africa is her inspiration, evident in both her choice of subjects and her incorporation of traditional African beads and Shwe Shwe fabric into her paintings. She loves using colour, wide brushes, stencils and her palette knife to add accents and character to her paintings.

Her portraits were influenced by her work with children in the townships where she taught at a Saturday School. Her paintings capture the expression and emotion, seen in the eyes of her subjects, often showing the strength of the woman she paints and vulnerability of the children.

Julie has exhibited her work at a number of galleries in Cape Town. Her paintings hang in people’s homes in Alaska, Switzerland, Poland, India, Canada, England and in many beautiful homes in South Africa.