The creative drive of of Danish artist Julie Celina is generated by an omnipresent urge to express herself visually. Celina is easily inspired by most things, and through practice, she taught herself to find inspiration in everything, good and bad, the pretty and the ugly.

ARTICULATE 32 [ensemble], is a magazine of contemporary art, packed with 80 pages of high quality content, showcasing the work of 5 professional artists, featuring the Danish watercolor and ink artist Ole Aakjær, the Portuguese artist Cristina Troufa, the Spanish creative duo Nastplas, the Iranian photographer Ali Zolghadri and the Danish painter Julie Celina.

This article about Julie Celina is part of the 32th magazine, ARTICULATE #32 | ensemble. Read, download or order your print version of the full publication below.

Julie Celina

an article written by Carmen Line Hust

To the Danish artist Julie Celina (b. 1996), art has the ability to intersect us with our humanity and help us find the exact place, where we belong. It can inspire us and challenge our beliefs. Celina portrays people and nature in her oil paintings with the purpose of helping people connect in a deeper relation to nature, within and outside themselves.

The creative drive of Celina is generated by an omnipresent urge to express herself visually. Celina is easily inspired by most things, and through practice, she taught herself to find inspiration in everything, good and bad, the pretty and the ugly.

To Julie Celina it is extremely beneficial to surround herself with other creatives. At Kunstnerfabrikken (The Artist Factory) Celina takes part of a larger community of fellow artists, with whom she collaborates and exchange ideas.

The preferred media of Julie Celina is, unsurprisingly, oil paint. She enjoys the smoothness of oil paint and the fact that it dries slowly, in contrast to acrylics. In thought, Celina is planning to make her own oil paints with natural materials. Over all, Julie Celina wants her painting practice to be as sustainable and non-toxic as possible, to get closer to nature and to bring even more natural elements into her paintings.

The works of Celina are mostly well prepared and configured. Most of her experimentations are carried out in her sketchbook. Oftentimes, Celina mix up a lot of photographs on her computer to create a collage, serving as a reference for future paintings.

A process that I really enjoy is to plan most of the painting, and paint from my reference up until the very last layer, where I put the reference aside, and just intuitively make the last details with no plans for them. I also tend to rely on happy accidents throughout the painting process, so if something spontaneously appears on the canvas, that I really like, I just leave it like that.

Julie Celina tend to work in series. Her favourite way of finding inspiration for a new series, is through a tea meditation or a cacao ceremony. In her meditations she communes with the plants, she’s working with, and she feels able to ask the plants directly what messages they want her to communicate through her paintings. Through such meditations, Celina always gets very vivid images in mind - a co-creation with nature. Sometimes Celina knows what images she wants to paint after her meditations, and other times she just gets a prompt or a message to make her references from.

In creating a good composition, Julie Celina is quite conservative. Celina follows of most the rule of thirds, as she enjoys how to guide the spectators eyes in order not to get confused, mislead or by any other chance misguided.

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Julie Celina is inspired by the art of the American contemporary painter Daniel Bilmes, American Brad Kunkle (b. 1978), Swedish Sandra Nobre and Australian Brittany Ferns. To Celina, they all paint in muted tones and earthy colours, which she adores.