Julie Baxendell is proud to have her work on
display this month at the Blue Moon Restaurant in
Rehoboth Beach in a one-person show featuring landscapes (including her
traditional obsession with boats!) from a recent trip to Italy, and an
earlier visit to Portugal. Working lately in oils, she enjoys the same
intuitive use of color she’s had since childhood.
Baxendell has always wanted to be an
artist. Her first piece to be displayed in a gallery, the Woodmere Art
Museum in Philadelphia, was a simple painting done in oils. She still
has it, a still life depicting pears and apples on a pedestal with a
good composition and an excellent use of color. The museum classified it
as a “primitive style” piece. They didn’t know she was only eight.
After graduating from art school
(University of the Arts in Philadelphia) where she majored in
illustration, Baxendell found work more readily as a graphic designer,
doing illustrations now and then. She became the driving force behind
the graphic design business she started with her husband. She met with
their clients to determine what they needed, juggled the schedule for
those who needed things done yesterday, did most of the artwork and
layout herself, and delivered the finished jobs to the customer’s
office and the printer, where she oversaw production. She also assumed
most of the responsibility for raising three kids and running the
household, since those were the days when cooking and cleaning, laundry
and grocery shopping were “women’s work.”
“That’s just what women did back
then,” she says as if it were no big deal, although she does remember
once working fifty-four straight hours with lots and lots of coffee.
She’d wanted to paint, but after a long day as a designer, mother and
housewife combined, she didn’t have the time or the energy.
Years later, after the kids were grown
and I came into the picture, she “retired” to Milton and we became
innkeepers for another dozen years. In between the multitude of chores
to run the Honeysuckle Inn for women, she was still doing part-time
graphic design and illustration work—and still wanting to paint.
Giving up her role as innkeeper was hard in some ways, but it did allow
her to finally make the time to become an accomplished fine artist known
for her unusually bold watercolors, and now oils.
Today, Baxendell’s resumé boasts a
fellowship grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts for an
established professional painter, as well as an entry in a national
juried show in Wayne, Pa. and several awards from the Children’s Beach
House in Lewes. She’s been steadily making a name for herself in
dozens of local shows. She’s been an active member of the Rehoboth Art
League for the last eight years, and a founding member of the Artists’
Exchange, who meet monthly to share critiques of their work in progress.
Their last show together was in March at the Peninsula Gallery in Lewes.
Baxendell’s
opening reception at the Blue Moon is Saturday, April 5, from 2-4 p.m.
The show will hang through the month of April. She hopes you will come
and celebrate her success.
|
Back to Top of Page 