Born in Moncton (N-B), Julie St-Amand has been living in Québec for over twenty years. After her studies in Visual Arts in Montreal, she spent a year in France to study at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Quimper. She currently lives in Québec City where she completed her Master's in 2005. Here is how Julie St-Amand describes her approach: ''Over time, my painting took shape with images from everyday life. Strolling and living in the heart of urban architectures, these tend to resonate in my painting. Places where the signs of the times accumulate are everywhere in the landscape. They consist of disaster areas, walls of buildings ravaged by bad weather, rusted architectural structures, abandoned pinnacles, etc. I am inspired by these urban landscape elements because they make up the mysterious history of present-day cities and the signs of the passage of time keep being renewed. Thus, my painting reveals both the city and the matter. In the workshop, I subject my paintings to bad treatments which, together with the accumulation of layers of paint and beeswax, transform the subject into a pretext to paint, to use lines and forms in order to retrieve the matter in an anonymous representation of the city. Painting with encaustic allows me to play between the coats of paint and beeswax in order to re-create the gesture and the aging action of a painting that would have undergone itself an alteration, a deterioration.'' Julie St-Amand is represented in numerous galleries in Canada and Québec, and she is part of several private and public collections, Loto Québec and Desjardins among others