Julia Hagen

It all started when…

I had always been drawn to art from an early age, but when it came time to decide on a college major I thought there was no way being an artist was a viable career path. So I enrolled in the pre-med program at Boston College, but after just one semester I knew I’d made a mistake.

Taking a leave of absence, I came back home to Chicago with the idea of touring a few art schools. After just one tour at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago I was sold, and the rest was history… Well not quite.

I struggled for a while even in art school to accept that I wanted to become a painter. At the time, I didn’t have many examples of living painters that had thriving careers. So I took classes in almost every other department, before finally settling back into my fate as a painter.

After I graduated with a BFA in 2017 from SAIC, I felt lost and like I had wasted my college years not focusing solely on painting. It took a few years out of school and experimenting on my own before my style really began to form. In that time I explored subject matter like florals, landscapes, and then finally cityscapes.

Cityscapes was where I had my “ah ha!” moment. Something clicked and I felt like I had inspiration all around me. And before I knew it, I was finding inspiration in the humble hot dog stand, which led me to my current series “Every Last Stand”. A series where I am on a mission to capture as many Chicago Hot Dog Stands as I can through my perspective as an artist.

I feel like this path to the hot dog stand series makes so much sense now. I had been searching everywhere for what to become as a person, and as an artist, but it was right under my nose the whole time. I’m just a Chicago girl that needed to come home and dive into her love of this city to find it.

To see more of Julia's work, visit her website, Instagram, and Facebook.