An Artist's Tale
Every artist knows the struggle to find a suitable studio; the ups and downs of positive crits and gallerists’ or collectors’ interest in their work, interspersed with periods of seeming failure; and, more often than not, the need to find some other source of income to support themselves in their artistic career. Art, Life and Everything, the memoir of abstract artist Julie Umerle, takes its reader on just such a rollercoaster journey, exacerbated, for a time, as she splits her life between London and New York.
Umerle is not only struggling as an artist. Aged four, she suffered a convulsive fit that left her paralysed. Later diagnosed with Transverse Myelitis – a rare neurological disorder involving inflammatory attacks on the central nervous system – she has battled with fluctuating and worsening levels of debilitation ever since and has been a wheelchair-user for most of her life, something which presents a whole range of additional challenges for an artist working with large-scale canvases (150 x 240 cm).
The book begins in the 1980s after Umerle has finished her degree in fine art at Falmouth University and, having moved back home to Walthamstow, seeks to establish herself on the London art scene. It accompanies her through time spent in a drug-filled squat, her first solo exhibition at the Car Breaker Gallery in Frestonia (the artistic counterculture area of Notting Hill), and on to her settling in to one after another of more-or-less suitable live/work spaces in north London.
Overcoming life threatening operations on her spine, Umerle is honoured in 1988 with a solo exhibition at the Barbican Centre, Ten Years of Painting. Her career seems to be on the up. Nevertheless, she still needs an income alongside her painting, and, after beginning as a freelance artist helping lead workshops with Shape Arts (an organisation which runs art workshops for people with special needs), she moves on to give talks and lead tours at the Royal Academy and the Hayward Gallery.
In 1996, however, Umerle ups sticks and heads to New York for a two-year MFA course in painting at Parsons School of Design. Her adventures on the other side of the Atlantic include getting to know her father in Connecticut (where she was born to immigrant parents, before moving to London with her mum and elder sister, following the breakdown of her parents’ marriage shortly after her paralysis), and having one of her paintings described – apparently in a complimentary manner – by art critic Jerry Saltz as ‘fucked-up formica’. Her art develops, influenced by the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists, as well as by Gerhard Richter. She experiments with materials and textures, fractals and surfaces.
Umerle realised early on that she would have to make life decisions on a different basis from most people – bearing in mind accessibility requirements as much as, if not more than, quality of tuition or exhibition space, etc. This is a battle that plays out on some level throughout the book, although Umerle is keen to reinforce her own view that: ‘I do not think of disability as being a big part of my identity. I have always thought, rather, that my identity comes more from being an artist.’ And, ultimately, this is proven by her success.
As well as her exhibition at the Barbican, she has also shown at such prestigious London venues as the Royal Academy and Christie’s – as well as, more recently, at Bermondsey Project Space. Internationally, she has exhibited in the USA, France, Germany, Poland and China. She has been the recipient of four grants from the Arts Council, and her paintings are held in private and public collections including the Deutsche Bank Collection, The Connaught, Swindon Art Gallery and Madison Museum of Fine Art, USA.
This book is personal and practical, funny and tragic, and, most of all, enduringly relevant to anyone struggling to make a go of things in any career today.
Anna McNay, State/F22 magazine
Issue 30. May-July 2022
FREE. Available at many art venues
Art, Life and Everything: A Memoir
Julie Umerle
186pp PB
TRYPTIC
ISBN-13: 978-1-5272-4216-6
Available at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones and Foyles and some independent bookshops
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