Biography
Juila Gurney (b. Northampton, UK 1955), originally from a farming background in Buckinghamshire, near Milton Keynes, studied at Bath Academy of Art (1976) and did a printmaking diploma at Brighton Polytechnic (1977) followed by a painting postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Art, London (1979-80). She won its Minor Travel Scholarship in 1979 and the John Minton Award in 1980. After leaving art college she started to work in London in Adult Education at Lambeth, Putney and Wandsworth Institutes and Putney School of Art, teaching drawing and painting and life drawing. Gurney and her husband Peter Gourd moved to Havelock Street in Helensburgh in 1991, where the nearby Scottish scenery and the weather captured her imagination. She taught at the Department of Adult and Continuing Education, which later became the Department of Open Studies, at Glasgow University until 2015.