A restless curiosity led Julia O’Reilly to explore many art forms. Her explorations include paint, etching, pastel, animation, motion design and digital matte painting in film. She now teaches private lessons, classes and workshops in painting, drawing, media arts and animation. Residencies include a National Endowment for the Arts youth project creating public art. Julia has taught classes in traditional art and computer animation, media arts and technology at Lane Community College, Portland Community College, Oregon School of Arts and Crafts.
Originally from the Midwestern US and now a long-term resident of the Northwest, Julia lives and works from her studio in Eugene, Oregon. She has exhibited works in gouache, pastel, acrylic painting and etching extensively in the Pacific Northwest and internationally. Her work is represented in many corporate and private collections, including the ‘Visual Chronicle of Portland’ Oregon and the Heathman Collection.
Early in her career, O’Reilly migrated from intaglio printmaking to the more immediate color intensity of her own formulated hand-crafted pastels, then to paint.
Julia received her MFA from University of Oregon, studying under LaVerne Krause. Among her early influences are Rodney S. Frew, George Rose, Hugh Yorty and John Careggio. These Midwestern artists connected with the Abstract Expressionists school and Atelier 17. They were informed by the work of the Impressionist and Surrealist artists and the ‘father of modern printmaking,’ Mauricio Lasansky, who studied the work of Picasso, El Greco, Goya, Modigliani, Chagall and Stanley William Hayter. This rich mix of early influences continues to deeply inform O’Reilly’s work.