In the time of the Old Masters, patrons always played an important role. Without them, the world might never have known about the genius of artists like Rembrandt.
For Jacksonville native Julianna O’Hara, who is making a name for herself as a painter in the Old Masters style, that patron was her grandmother.
Though cognizant of their middle daughter’s talent and interest in art, O’Hara’s parents did not have the financial wherewithal to fund the child’s creative pursuits. But her grandmother had a friend who taught a class in oil painting, mostly to older women, and the means to pay for her granddaughter’s lessons and supplies.
“I had a little tackle box, and I would take it on
Wednesdays to this private class,” recalled O’Hara. “I only had three paintbrushes, and I had certain colors; I didn’t have the luxury
of having a whole palette of different oil paints.”
A tube of quality oil paint, even back then, was $25.
O’Hara said these early lessons were extremely important to the development of her art. This is where she discovered critical techniques that many might find counter-intuitive.
It took young Julianna about four weeks to complete a painting, always a still life, and her grandmother would always frame it.
“Those pictures are still framed at my father’s house,” O’Hara said.
But her talents had been obvious from the beginning.
“I would sit there in kindergarten doing Snoopy cartoons, Snoopy on his little house,” she recalled. “In kindergarten, they wanted everybody to draw their favorite food. I was like: I love chicken legs. I drew a chicken leg with the bumps and the shadows and everything. All the other kids were drawing a candy bar or a piece of candy. Then, we walked around the class; I was holding it up, and I remember the kids were like: ‘That’s a chicken leg!’ The teacher went to my mother and said, ‘Julianna’s got some talent; she drew a chicken leg!’”
She continued to draw and paint throughout her teen years and later, while living in California, audited classes at Santa Monica College through UCLA Extension. But she knew she couldn’t make a career of her passion for art.
A personality test pointed her in a practical direction and she took up dental hygiene, earning her degree and working from a small office in Columbia, South Carolina.
“It was one little, tiny window, and I thought: Is this going to be my life?” she said. “I wanted something more.”
Since then, she said, “I have lived a thousand lives.”
In her 20s, she moved to California, where she joined Screen Actor’s Guild and appeared on “Days of Our Lives” and “Golden Girls” and industrial films made for corporate use, describing the features of a new car or anti-glare eyeglass lenses. She did stand-in work, once for Meryl Streep.
Throughout it all, dental hygiene provided a reliable income.
Meanwhile, she was creating huge abstract paintings in acrylic, which were collected by friends.
Finally, in her early 30s, she abandoned the Golden State and returned to South Carolina at the suggestion of her mother, who encouraged her to get a real estate license. Six months later, she returned to California to visit friends and met the man she would marry, a physicist and 
Bostonian, Michael O’Hara. The wedding took place in St. Augustine on the grounds of Mission Nombre de Dios in the tiny chapel of Our Lady of La Leche.
The couple divided their time between Carmel, California, and the First Coast, finally retiring to Ponte Vedra Beach, where Julianna O’Hara has devoted much of her attention to her art.
Here, she regularly shows her work at the Sawgrass Art Show. She also had a recent solo exhibition at the First Coast Cultural Center. As part of that show, she added an interesting dimension by including some of the props she had used in her paintings.
O’Hara has been painting seriously for the past decade, increasingly entering her work in contests and shows internationally, but she has not stopped learning.
She found YouTube videos devoted to Ignace Henri Jean Theodore Fantin-Latour that gave her ideas for her setups. And she has been taking classes online from Gregg Kreutz at the Art Students League in New York and David Leffel, who has been called a living Rembrandt.
But despite her accomplished still lifes, the awards she’s won and often being juried into Oil Painters of America shows – which she calls “a tough nut to crack” — O’Hara maintains a laudable humility.
“I still consider myself a student,” she said. “Even David Leffel says he is still a student.”
A self-professed night owl, O’Hara begins painting in the afternoons, usually for between two and four hours a day. She often gets lost in her work and doesn’t even know what time it is.
“I’m in a heavenly place when I’m painting,” she said. “It’s a rare place to be. I can almost match it when I’m walking the beach, but nothing like whenever I’m in my studio painting.”
In that studio, she paints while standing, which infuses her work with an almost intangible energy. As a consequence, she must place her subjects on artificially high “tables.” She marks her place on the floor so that she can always be sure to view her subject from the precise same angle, which is critical to ensuring that reflections of light and shadows remain consistent.
Mirrors allow her to check her progress in a technique that enables right-brain painting.
O’Hara was first introduced to the benefits of right-brain painting in that class she took as a child.
Struggling to draw a bottle’s symmetry, she received a valuable piece of advice from her instructor: Turn it upside down. This allowed her to escape preconceptions and see the bottle’s true shape.
The teacher added some companion advice: Pay attention not to the object being drawn but rather to the negative space around the object.
Another key component of her studio is the light source.
The Old Masters exclusively relied upon light from a single source, always coming from the north, which wasn’t subject to the waxing and waning of shadows as the day wore on.
“The reason those paintings look different than what you see now is because they used north light,” O’Hara explained. “So, any studio pretty much in Paris or New York, they’re going to have a north light window.”
Because her studio doesn’t have a window in the correct place, and because she often paints after dark, O’Hara substitutes a strategically placed “daylight bulb” that mimics actual sunlight.
“It’s a nice light,” she said. “You have these beautiful, warm shadows.”
O’Hara paints exclusively in oils and on expensive linen. She does not paint from photographs – except when she is trying to capture flowers that may die -- and does not take commissions.
When she’s working, the phone is off, there’s no TV, the windows and plantation shutters are closed. She does, however, play music.
Talking about her art, her journey, and all that has contributed toward it, O’Hara returns several times to the gratitude she feels.
“I am so blessed,” she says with a broad smile.
To learn more about her work, go to juliannaohara.com.
