BIOGRAPHY

For 17 years, Julie Houck traveled the world as a professional location photographer. Working in many diverse locations throughout Europe, Asia and across the United States, provided Houck an invaluable opportunity to increase her understanding of composition and the elements of design. Houck’s career as a photographer also instilled in her a fascination with the powerful effects of light.

In 1995, Houck decided to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a painter. “I decided to redirect and pursue what I truly loved.” As a contemporary landscape painter working in oils and encaustics, Houck aspires to capture not only the scene, but also the moment and mood, relying on her study of the classical principles of directly observing color, light and form in nature.

She has studied with contemporary realist painters at the Atelier of Classical Realism in San Francisco with David Hardy, the Academy of Fine Art in Seattle with Anthony Ryder and most recently, in France, at the L’Ecole Albert Defois with Ted Seth Jacobs. Houck studied en plein air with John Cosby, Kevin MacPherson, Don Demers and Kim English.

Houck’s landscapes reflect the influence of these artists as she hones her classical technique of painting in numerous transparent layers in order to recreate the subtle play of light on the scene. Her desire to capture the essence of the landscape is evolving into compositions dissolving into only the barest, most minimal components—the sky, horizon and land.

An award winner at the National Paint America Competition, Houck has also been a recipient of the David Warren Memorial Scholarship Grant, a Hawaii State Foundation of Culture and the Arts Acquisition Award as well as many exhibition prizes for painting.

Houck’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the Hawaii State Art Museum. She was one of the featured artists at the commemorative Artists of Hawaii exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Art in 2000, and invited to exhibit in the prestigious Maine, the Painted State Invitational in 2019.

A Signature painter of the American Impressionist Society, Plein Air Painters of Hawaii and International Plein Air Painters, Houck has been published in American Art Collector, Art New England, Maine Magazine, Art Guide Maine, Old Port Magazine, International Artist, Southwest Art and HI Luxury magazines.