Biography

I, Julia Stout a mile high city girl began creating art as a child with mud, straw forts, and family gatherings on the porch to paint a still life.  My father was really creative: an inventor, a builder/developer,a musician,a painter, an architect with ideas aplenty and my mother an incredible gardener, decorator with impecable taste,and floral arranger.  I was lucky art was everywhere for me. All through highschool I studied the history of art, painted, made props for events,little sculptures, and knew being an artist was a gift I had been given for life. 

When I was allowed to begin my college studies in Italy, my father wrote me and told me to chose a career that would make me money.  When I had enough saved, then I could begin my exploration of art as a lifestyle.  I studied and became an interior designer; worked for years with colors,interior architecture, furniture design, contract management,and space planning. Life was good!

After creating several successful companies and a couple of failed marriages,I decided to go back to college.  I was a product designer wanting more.  I studied film and video to create a documentary on Women in Industrial Design over the last fifty years for my Product Design Masters Thesis.  I built sets for Public Television and learned how to produce, direct, edit video and film.  I felt television was the most corrupt  medium around. My ambition was to change that by creating documentaries to educate and inspire humans to do more with their lives.  I was interested in teaching, health and well being, so for years I did just that!

In 1997 I remarried and  moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains to discover jobs were rare to find, and did not pay much!   I took my savings and began my exploration of fine art.  Art is so personal and challenging when you look at what you want to say. My first body of fine art was "stone souls rising series" made of coldformed steel. I studied Dharma Art as a path to creating quiet, peaceful, and contemplative work.  As a product designer I continued to design art that is useful. 

I continue to explore new mediums and honor the preciousness of the life that I have. I see the metaphors and ego dramas that art challenges and creates with the refinement of each new work.  So I choose to follow the path of least resistence and hope my work reflects the happiness that simplicity brings to all our lives.                                                                                                  2007