Self-taught artist, Juli Fejer, uses a distinctive combination of colour, mark making and perspective to create landscapes that are both familiar and strange. Her art is rooted in lived experience but she also uses landscape as a metaphor for emotional states. She works with watercolour, acrylic and her iPad to explore different moods and subjects.

Fejer draws inspiration from the cycles of the natural world – abundance, decay and regeneration. From city parks to ancient forests, she is drawn to trees, their secret collaborations and their contribution to human well-being.

Fibromyalgia gives Fejer an acute sensitivity to smells, sounds and colours, which allows her to pick up the nuances of her surroundings.

Although she identifies in the tradition of the outsider artist, Fejer was brought up in a house of colour and design, and has always thought in pictures. Her father was a designer, and her grandfather, a Hungarian watercolourist. After decades of chronic pain and depression, she began doodling on her iPad. She was encouraged to take her talent seriously by therapists at her local hospital. Soon, what had started as a hobby became a passion as she reconnected with her childhood love of art.

In 2021, one of Fejer’s paintings was selected by Yinka Shonibare for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and she was invited to take part in a BBC2 documentary which followed four hopeful applicants.

She was selected for the ING Discerning Eye in 2020 and 2021 and has participated in numerous art fairs and group exhibitions including with the Society of East Anglian Watercolourists and non-profit organisation, ArtCan. In partnership with a photographer, Fejer created a six-week gallery exhibition in 2022 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.

In 2023, Fejer was part of a project team awarded a £500 bursary by the HollyBush Prize to put on an exhibition in Cambridge. She was shortlisted for the D31 Art Prize, and long listed for the Women in Art Prize and the Visual Artists Association professional award.

Fejer was shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2024, and has recently been artist in residence for the charity A Space Between, which provides mindful art resources for hospitals and health facilities.