Julie Bégin's fascination with the transforming power of makeup began
as a child. From an early age she experimented on faces and by the time she
was 18, she'd left her science studies behind and embarked on her nomadic makeup
journey.
Julie got her first job on a dare. A friend persuaded her to apply for a makeup
position while visiting Toronto. Despite the fact that she had no formal training,
her talent shone through and she found herself working in a field that proved
to be a perfect fit.
In 1998, after spending more then eight years refining her trade in Europe
and Asia, Julie moved to New York to further her career and pursue her interest
in arts. She soon attracted the attention of celebrated makeup artist Dick Page
and rapidly became a top player on his team working in New York, Milan and Paris.
The top names in the fashion and entertainment industries quickly began to
seek Julie out: Fashion designers like John Galliano, Marc Jacobs and Helmut
Lang called on her. She worked with such prominent photographers as Ellen Von
Unwerth and Mick Rock on editorial and advertising shoots, and world-renowed
singers and celebrities, including Céline Dion and Alanis Morisette.
Julie's methods are wide-ranging and imaginative. From effortless natural
looks to dramatic styles, even when creativity's limits are pushed to the extreme,
her main focus in fashion is always to reveal the beauty of a face. "The challenge
of designing makeup for a Cirque du Soleil show is to go beyond beauty to reveal
character," she says. Every face is a new inspiration, and when it all works
you're actually revealing more than the person, you're able to catch a glimpse
of their soul."
Julie's designs for OVO called for an evocation of the insect world.
"I wasn't given a precise mandate," she says. "But I knew I didn't want to simply
reproduce actual insect heads. I took the rather stark designs of the Bauhaus
and the sculptor Alexander Calder as my starting points, but as the production
evolved I drew back from the abstractions of those sources of inspiration and
arrived at something more organic, perhaps more inspired by the work of Gaudí
or the Organic Abstractionists. This quote form Antony Gromley sums it up nicely:
My work is an attempt to materialize the place at the other side of appearance
where we all live."
Julie Bégin was born in Montréal and lives in New York.