Julia was born in The Hague, Netherlands in 1945. Her grandfather sold fresh flowers from a wooden cart in the streets of Harlem, NLD, so her mother always had live flowers in the house. This is where she discovered her love of flowers. Her artistic father had a business in Holland designing fur coats in the 1940's. She has saved copies of his designs on models, and attributes her love for old Dutch masters to him. Julia's family came to America in October 1950 to settle in the Pasadena, California area where she grew up in the foothills, Altadena.

        She has two children and was a banker for over 40+ years. In 1981, she moved to Northern California and bought a four-plex in Berkeley. By taking night classes she completed her schooling to get her BS from the University of San Francisco. After finishing her degree she was able to take fun classes like drawing and watercolor painting. She often painted for friends and family, but stopped in 1990 due to volunteer duties. There was a four-week showing of her work at the Reno Southwest Library in 2005, where she lived for 25 years.

        Currently she lives near family in one of her units in Berkeley. In February and May of 2023 she had her second and third showings at Art Adobe, Castro Valley. Recently she was pleased to find Mary Harden, a professional botanical artist, and joined her watercolor class in Castro Valley. It was exciting to satisfy her love of making watercolors of flowers. In her words, she now paints with much more realism and her work has improved 100+%. She has enjoyed learning the right way to do a watercolor: drawing the detail of the plant with an ink pen, then tackling the shading and tones. Now she likes what she draws and I tries to paint by Mary’s strict standards. 

        The process--Observe, draw, paint, and insert the detail.