Julia Ball obituary

The Guardian

28-04-2025

My friend Julia Ball, who has died aged 94, was an artist and art teacher.
An outstanding abstract landscape painter, she exhibited in London, Brighton, Norwich, Liverpool, King's Lynn, Bury St Edmunds, and many times at the beautiful Old Fire Engine House in Ely. She also held an annual open event at her studio for 50 years running.
A member of the Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors, she held group exhibitions annually throughout the 1980s and 90s at the Fitzwilliam Museum. In addition her work can be seen in the collections of three Cambridge colleges – Churchill, Lucy Cavendish and Murray Edwards.
Julia was born in the village of South Tawton, Devon, to Rosamund (nee Gill), a housewife, and Edward Ball, a clerk in holy orders who ministered to a series of parishes. Her secondary education came at St Mary's, Calne, a boarding school in Wiltshire, before she went on to do an art degree at Reading University.
After graduating she taught art in a series of secondary schools and adult education colleges in London, and then from the mid-1960s in Cambridge schools. Eventually she became a tutor in painting at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology from 1975 until her retirement in 1990.
One of Julia's proudest achievements was her role in helping to set up, in 1974, Cambridge Open Studios, an annual event that provides members of the public with the opportunity to visit working studios in the city and to buy art direct from the artists.
Partly as a result of that initiative, innumerable households in and around Cambridge have one or more of Julia's marvellous oils, watercolour pastels, drawings or prints. Her work has covered everything from the north Norfolk coast and the fenlands around Cambridge to the domes of Isfahan in Iran.
Aside from her artistic preoccupations, Julia – a socialist and feminist – took part in numerous political actions over the years, marching in support of the Grunwick demonstrators, the 1984-85 miners' strike, CND, the Greenham Common peace camp and in opposition to the Iraq war.
Though she closely guarded her need for solitude, she was at the centre of a strong group of passionate female friends for whom she was a great inspiration.