About Julia Knight
Biography
Artist Julia Trawick Knight, a native of Cedartown, Georgia, began her studies in 1973 at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee with Richard Duncan and Ed Carlos. She transferred to the Ringling School of Art at Sarasota, Florida to continue study in sculpture and figure painting with Bob Larsen and Ethelia Patmagrian. While in Sarasota, she completed a four-year apprenticeship with the well-known sculptor Leslie Posey. She also completed additional training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
In 1979, she moved to Rome to establish an art studio focusing on sculptural portraits. One of the artist’s earliest portrait studies was of Frederick Knight of Cartersville whom she married in 1981. After several years of retirement to raise her three children and help restore a home on the Etowah River that had been in her husband’s family since the Civil War, Julia returned to active portrait sculpture work in 1996. Since that time she has completed commissions for clients in northwest Georgia, Houston Texas, and Atlanta. Her bronze sculpture subjects have included babies, young children, teenagers, businessmen, a physician, and a favored family pet, an English setter. Julia has participated in many exhibits in northwest Georgia, South Carolina, the National Sculpture Society in New York City, and the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club and has worked for churches, colleges, museums, and private collectors designing and sculpting commissions.
Since 2002, Julia Knight has made Pietrasanta, Italy her resident art studio, casting, and sculpting in the old art colony of Michelangelo’s Toscana. “Working in Italy has made a huge difference in my concentration and the quality of my work,” says Ms. Knight.
In 2006, Julia marked her tenth anniversary in business by unveiling three sculptures in Cartersville, Georgia. In February 2006, a bronze bust of President Jimmy Carter was unveiled in the Hall of Presidents at the Booth Museum of Western Art in Cartersville, Georgia. The portrait captures the more serious thoughtful likeness of President Carter. In April 2006 the Tree Mandala was presented to Georgia Highlands College by a group of donors. This bonded copper bas-relief of a gigantic oak tree surrounded by leafy branches hangs in the entrance hall of the Cartersville campus. The President of the College related the importance and permanence of education to the massive oak. In May 2006 the Morgan Monument to Education was unveiled at the new Summer Hill Complex. Dedicated to the memory of two teachers at the former all black high school, the nine-foot bronze sculpture towers over the former campus. The Bartow County History Center uses this sculpture to teach the legacy of segregation to all eighth graders in the Bartow County Public School System.
In the fall of 2006 Julia Knight sculpted a commission for the parents of a deceased teenager. The Erika Memorial was unveiled at Darlington School and dedicated to their daughter’s classmates, the graduating Class of 2007.
In 2007 Julia experimented with direct wax casting creating two collections of small sculptures titled, “Shadow People” and “Suspended People.” Recently, Julia has begun “returning to her roots.” She has relocated her studio to Cedartown, Georgia, and she is currently working to coordinate an exhibit in Denmark from which her family emigrated in 1904. Julia’s Danish grandmother was a painter and traveled around the United States painting the communities that she visited. To honor the memory of her grandmother, in the exhibit Julia will showcase her beloved grandmother’s paintings and her own sculptures. In the early months of 2008 Julia focused on drawing from live models, a medium that is the foundation of good figurative sculpture.