Julian Yohannes
It was like a silent thunderbolt hitting me in the chest: I was 12 years old, spending the afternoon at a friend's house when I stumbled into an adjacent room and found myself staring at the most beautiful image I had ever seen before. A giant print of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss adorned the wall of the dimly-lit dining room. I stood there in silence, gazing at what would inevitably reveal itself as the most powerful influence on my understanding of the inextricable relationship between art and emotion.
Born in 1985 in Montreal, the son of an Ethiopian father and Scottish and Irish mother, drawing has been a constant influence on my identity and the way I see the world. Self-taught, my influences include Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, J.C. Leyendecker, Alphonse Mucha, Norman Rockwell, Vivian Maier, Yousuf Karsh and Alex Produkt, however, it is the human condition that continues to play the most significant role that has shaped my art and my understanding of how art is felt.
A rich balance of organic and geometric patterns that dance around my characters and harmonize a visual narrative owned only by the viewer, or an elderly woman whose wrinkled face tells a million stories of hardship, revealing an inner strength found only in survival-- my artwork has one purpose: to make you feel that which you cannot speak or hold.