Julie Green - Drawings

Julie Green recalls a talk at the National Art School’s Presence: Drawing Symposium (2021) in which a speaker described a curious, allegorical drawing by Leonardo known descriptively as A cloudburst of material possessions (c. 1506-12). [1] Leonardo’s drawing depicts everyday objects raining to earth and strewn along the ground in a critique of what he perceived as the material excess of the High Renaissance.

Years after that talk, Green began what she intended as a “sea drawing”. Beginning with a base of burnt umber and Delft blue, Green drew in white oil stick and white pencil in mirrored, ambidextrous strokes. Gestural and energetic, it was only after the seascape was complete that Green made the association with Leonardo’s drawing. To her abstract evocation of the sea, Green added Leonardo’s representational refuse— lanterns, rakes and ladders. The result in After Leonardo 2 (2025) is a work that pairs the turbulence of the sea—and the metaphysical richness that turbulence implies—with a reflection upon the chaos of our own consumerist age of plastic, waste and AI slop.

Leonardo’s drawings hold a meaningful presence in Green’s practice. Green recently joined a drawing group taught by Jennifer Keeler-Milne. Learning to work in silverpoint, Green has made copies of Leonardo’s drawings—including his studies of moving water—as well as original works. It is tempting to generalise the High Renaissance as a period of aesthetic science and the high-water mark of representational art. However, Leonardo’s extant drawings and writings reveal a mind that observed natural phenomena in a manner that is something other than strictly scientific or representational. A writer of poems and didactic precepts, Leonardo often ventured into the allegorical and metaphorical, perhaps even what we would reflect upon in contemporary terms to be precursors to surreal or abstract tendencies. 

Green’s previous exhibition at Annette Larkin Fine Art in 2022 responded to the Epic of Gilgamesh. That body of work reflected as much upon the process of decrypting cuneiform by Assyriologist George Smith as it did upon the narrative of the Epic itself. Famously, Leonardo wrote in mirrored script, a complement to his polymath genius and an added element of his enduring mythos as an historical figure. If there is a thread to be drawn in Green’s work between her interests in Gilgamesh and Leonardo, perhaps it is that study of mind—a probing at the creativities that lead not only to great epic poetry and finely observed drawing, but equally the study of the language (verbal and visual) and
consciousness that underlies all human endeavour.

The new drawings are bold in their scale and execution, yet are anchored by the exhibition’s oldest and smallest work: an untitled painting from 1995 with a unique subject. “I wanted to paint the sea in a glass,” says Green. At that time, the work was connected to experience and observation. Having sat in Green’s studio for thirty years, the work has led her to consider more “about the psyche and how it gets contained.” That visual metaphor of the sea in a glass is reflected well in the tension and balance between control and release across the exhibition.

Tuckson Twombly Crumb (C) (2023) is a particularly fine example. Green does not conceal her influences, recognising the immediacy of these three artists to her practice and this specific drawing. From Tony Tuckson comes gestural abstraction and a shared affinity for rich, deep blues across some of his most striking paintings. From Cy Twombly, a symbolist addendum to abstract expressionism and a commensurate attention to mark-making and scale. Then there is Charles Crumb, whose work and extremely troubled life story Green encountered in New York in the 1990s, especially his later works in which subject and form dissolved, becoming, as Green recalls “nothing more than lines on the page.”

Built up in overlaid lines of white crayon, Tuckson Twombly Crumb (C) has a bright, textural epicentre. Entirely apart from concerns of art history, Green had learned of the so-called zinc spark, a flash of light emitted by embryos at the moment of conception. At a scale even smaller still, it is subatomic activity that leads to the blinding, white-hot flash of a nuclear detonation. There are different qualities, textures, emotions and applications of white within this single drawing, and across this body of work as a whole.

It is Green’s openness in her practice that permits such breadth of interpretation. One of the two largest works in the exhibition is a vertical, untitled drawing that Green executed with wholly abstract intentions. Yet, on revealing it to others, Green heard all manner of metaphorical readings. One saw an icy winter descending from the clouds. Another saw, in the upper right margin, a refugee boat struggling above a deep and roiling sea. Green encourages these readings of her work, which she sees as helping her reconcile and understand what she has created. As Green puts it, she finds there is often a delay between execution and reflection within which “whatever I am doing might have surfaced a little bit more.” From wherever it emerges, and whatever the result, these drawings reflect an abiding interest in human creativity borne out through the limitations of the body. Each stands as the record of a conversation between artist and artwork, and a desire to understand what may be thought of as the archaeology of the unconscious mind.

Jack Howard, 2025

[1] Leonardo da Vinci, A cloudburst of material possessions, c. 1506-12, black chalk, pen and ink, 11.7 x 11.1 cm (sheet), Royal Collection Trust, United Kingdom (RCIN 912698).