Born Winter Solstice 1957 in Hastings, East Sussex ~ Died 30th January 2025 in Arundel, West Sussex

Julia Oak always felt a close afinity to nature, especially the trees that surrounded her rural childhood home in Hastings and her garden in Arundel where she lived for many years. It was in the latter that she first felt a presence who she called Nanya. It was a fortuitous meeting that led Julia on the creative path that enriched the last twenty years of her life.

To enter the world of Julia Oak’s art is to enter through a portal into an enchanted wood where there is the delight of encountering creatures and elemental beings amongst the entwined branches. Julia adopts techniques such as dowsing and meditation to aid her artistic process and there is a great attention to detail with her choice of materials. Beautiful papers and experimentation with different pens all form part of her work.  One of her largest works is a drawing ten metres in length and forms part of the permanent collection of The Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

On the other end of the scale, Julia produces kaleidoscopic sketchbooks filled with miniscule coloured circles, a cornucopia of coloured geometry. Her drawings are often created in series such as the black and white lockdown drawings which she completed in 30 minutes everyday, or her Into the Portal series which conveys Julia’s description of her creativity that her drawings are in fact conversations, flowing freely and intuitively between julia, the trees and the spiritual beings she meets. 

“In 2004 I began my drawing practice with pens on paper, mainly in sketchbooks. The images evolved from somewhere, and took me to a safe place. My spirituality had entered a Pagan phase and my beliefs and understanding of spirituality began to evolve at a rate of knots, coming thick and fast. I just had to draw. I could be whatever I wanted to be, go wherever I wanted to go and do. Within my enchanted wood there is much happening amongst and on the edge of the trees. There is life and death; fantasy and reality; good and bad; light and dark; it’s all there, the world I inhabit in my solitary life, it tells me I am never alone.”

I very rarely plan drawings over and above the paper I will use, and the range of colours for my mark making. Sometimes there is a focus, something I want to meditate upon; after that my pen is a dowsing rod and discovers what the page is willing to share. It is the act of drawing and the process that allows me to sift the information, stimulus, sounds, words and images that float around inside my mind, like a primordial cauldron bubbling up from below the membrane of my subconscious. Sometimes my thoughts surprise me and I wonder who this other ‘me’ is. 

I am an artist, and have been able to add that I am a psychic artist using the medium of drawing to commune with the spirit world. My artwork is strongly linked with Spirit. My spirit family are my mentors and they encourage me to be my authentic self. As I now find myself in that liminal space between life and death, I want to create more than anything else. It both heals and helps in the transition of transmutation to my Spirit Family.” Julia Oak, November 2024

Selected Exhibitions:
2024 Julia Oak: From the Portal and the Pen – Oxmarket Chichester
2022 Creative Spirits – The College of Psychic Studies, London
2021 Strange Things Among Us – The College of Psychic Studies, London
2021 Julia Oak with Madge Gill – Pallant House Gallery, Chichester