Julia Chandler Lawing is a Georgia native and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Julia’s art is featured in private collections across North America, corporate collections including Towne Bank and Georgia State University College of Law, and several public installations.
When not traveling or painting on location, Julia creates in her studio at ClearWater Arts Center in downtown Concord, North Carolina, where visitors are always welcome.
When I was 12, my mother relocated us from Atlanta to a small island in coastal Georgia, the site of my childhood summer vacations. Since she worked full time, my bike was the most reliable source of transportation.
Pedaling past the marsh, tidal creeks and wildlife at eye level revealed and cemented a world in my imagination that I might have missed otherwise. A way of seeing began for me — noticing the ever-changing coastal landscape, pulled by the moon and lit by the sun—which grew into deep appreciation, a habit of chasing beauty.
Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” This practice of paying attention materializes for me through taking photos, which I then translate into sketches and oil paintings. I create art as a way of processing and expressing gratitude for the beauty of the world which is, to me, evidence of the goodness of God.
“These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but…they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory
