Juliet Wood was born in London in 1939. She was encouraged to paint at the Arts Educational Schools and was spellbound by the original cave paintings at Lascaux. She studied at St Alban’s School of Art and the Slade, followed by a post-graduate year in Italy, painting and studying the Renaissance masters.
Juliet’s paintings and oil pastels are inspired by the realities of contemporary life, human interaction and the poignancy of what is so often seen yet unspoken. She has been dedicated to making art accessible for over two decades, through not only her subject matter but the approach itself to showing her work.
She recently completed a series of paintings of refugees in London, including survivors of trafficking and modern day slavery, shown in her 2019 retrospective with new work: A Human Touch. In 2013/14, she exhibited a major series made over the course of a decade in the nearby community of fast-growing post-railway town, Swindon. Launched by a public figure-drawing event in the central plaza, Alone and Together, Brunel’s People raised extensive interest and participation in visual art among those who were the very subject of the pictures. It was also shown for weeks on a BBC Big Screen in the plaza, seen by many people unfamiliar with paintings or galleries.
PORTRAITS. Her reputation for a searching and sensitive likeness is well established. Juliet has painted around two hundred people from all walks of life, from intimate heads to over life-size public commissions. Her portraits are in many public and private collections, including the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. She has exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait painters and the New Grafton Gallery Portrait Centre whose commissions led to a nation-wide portrait practice.
Juliet is widely experienced as a teacher and art school lecturer, notably at Swindon School of Art and Design. She has had several solo exhibitions and has produced two fully illustrated books for Alone and Together, Brunel’s People, and A Human Touch. She lives in Marlborough with her husband Simon Brett, the wood engraver, where they work at opposite ends of their plot.
