Julia Miner
Julia Miner Bio
A few years after receiving a Masters from the Yale School of Architecture, Julia Miner embarked on a solo bike trip through Europe. Sketching and photographing inspiring places, she realized she was drawn as much to the light hitting the landscape and buildings as to the architecture itself. She left her job at a well-known Connecticut firm and opened her own design office, giving her the flexibility to do more art and to study painting at the Vermont Studio Center and illustration at the DeCordova Museum.
During a decade in Arizona, while starting a family and doing award winning architecture work, Miner finished illustrations for The Shepherd's Song and The Unbreakable Code. Back in Massachusetts, she illustrated The Lighthouse Santa and Save Our Stream.
Illustrations from the Unbreakable Code in private collections were gathered to hang in a show at the University of Arizona commemorating the 7th anniversary of Pearl Harbor (2016). They were also part of a traveling group exhibit on Picture Book Art with the Arizona Commission on the Arts (1997-1999). The Unbreakable Code won the Arizona Governor’s Fourth Grade Literacy Book of the Year (2006) and the Western Writers of America Spur Award, Picture Book Category (1996), and was a Smithsonian Notable Book of the Year (1996).
Miner enjoys sharing the process of making a book, a painting, or a building with all ages, with author/illustrator visits to schools, and teaching college and adult classes. She lives in Concord and owns the local firm, East Side Studio Architects (essarc.com). During down time with family and friends she enjoys the outdoors, especially kayaking and “plein air” landscape painting.
Julia Miner Artist Statement
When I started illustrating my first book, I was excited to tell my favorite and most influential Dartmouth professor, renowned author/illustrator, Ashley Bryan. He truly cared about his students and had recommended me for architecture school.
When I told him that I was loving the project, but couldn’t bear to leave the architecture behind, he said, “You don’t have to decide between them, just do what’s important to your life right now.” What a relief! As I’ve held to that, my goal has been to share an architecture infused with art, and an art with structure and purpose.
Storytelling weaves its way into both disciplines. Like the characters that come alive to me while I’m illustrating, my clients are the heroes in my design process. As I draw out their hopes and dreams (their story), the result is a design that is unique to them, uplifting and at home in its surroundings. I have a similar relationship with my fictional characters – what environment do they need? How can the setting and atmosphere tell us more about who they are and what they feel? How does the “camera angle” – the viewer’s perspective - help suggest what the characters are thinking?
In all the books I’ve illustrated so far, conveying a vivid sense of place has been paramount, from the sacred lands of the Navajo to the windswept beaches of a Nantucket winter. I enjoy expressing the important connections in the narrative to nature, to the land, and to the actual story of a place. These connections are intertwined with the characters’ lives, and shape how their stories unfold.