“Painting is a high-energy endeavor, a sort of battle to both lose and maintain control at the same time,” Juras says. Since returning to Athens in 2000 with his wife, Beth Gavrilles, Juras has worked steadily to capture in oil on canvas the natural landscapes of the pre-settlement South.
super hard to see,” he says. Yet he saw. Juras shifts to avoid a shaft of light which illuminates his hazel eyes. He has a shock of brown hair, which is neatly trimmed, and wears jeans and a casual jacket. His bike is just outside, in view. He can jump on the bike and easily disappear within a group of students on the Athens streets, like a shadow play or a ghost. Here, then not. The man who can see the ghosts of old landscapes can also become one whenever he wishes. “An incomplete picture…” “I wanted to understand the South that I grew up in but the more I learned the more I found the South to be a radically changed landscape. I wanted a more complete picture,” says Juras. A few years after art school, he attended the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference with his mother, Agnes. Darrel Morrison, a landscape architect at UGA, and fire ecologist Cecil Frost were both at the Cullowhee conference. “Darrel is the reason I went into landscape architecture and is part of the reason I focus so much on the plant communities of the Southeast in my current work.” Frost vividly depicted the Piedmont as a fairly grassy, open landscape, once experiencing frequent low-intensity fires. “This was not how I imagined the virgin forest,” Juras recalls. Frost’s lecture influenced the thesis Juras wrote four years later. The artist and fire ecologist reconnected two years ago.
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“I have not seen Philip since the talk that he mentioned,” Frost writes by e-mail. “I did see one of his paintings in a magazine and thought of contacting him. Now I will. My undergraduate degree was in art and I always wanted to be a landscape painter but got into fire ecology instead (I think of what I do as painting the landscape with fire). What a compliment, to have supplied some of the inspiration for a magnificent landscape artist like Philip!” While a graduate student, Juras took all of Morrison’s classes—some twice. This is possibly why the painted throats of the white-topped pitcher plants, which Juras calls “the lovely carnivore,” are offered up in such a beguiling way. These details—unexpected and dewy witchgrass—a chalky stalk arising from milky waters—enchant the viewer just as they did Bartram. Juras knows exactly what he has seen and he shows us. The Art of Re-Creation “To re-create requires a brilliant magician…As if he traveled alongside Bartram, carrying a box of paints and a leather tube of rolled-up canvas, making sure that the work was not swept away in river crossings or lost on horseback. The painter was given the eyes of Bartram,” marvels Ray in the essay “The Affected Heart of Philip Juras”. Juras chews his lip. “Mostly, I want people to think I’m not too serious and even a bit lazy,” he jokes. He inscribes his new book, Philip Juras: The Southern Frontier, Landscapes
Inspired by Bartram’s Travels with this: “Just think, if I didn’t grow up in the suburbs of Augusta, always looking elsewhere for the nature I couldn’t find in the neighborhood, these paintings would probably all be of barns, lighthouses, and puppies!” Sarah Ross, president of the Wormsloe Foundation in Savannah, is grateful. “Philip is uniquely qualified and exceptionally talented. His academic background, with a BFA in painting and drawing and a MLA, provide the knowledge and structure for his landscape compositions, which are accurately rendered historically and ecologically. Philip’s innate talent is brought to life by his steadfast work ethic. His paintings are not just important; they are, in the true sense of the word, treasures.” Juras says, “What I am doing now with art is structured, like my thesis,” he explains.“My work is to engage, compel, to tell you a story, the experience of place,” he says. Becoming an Artist The artist likes experiencing where few explore, pressing into places of discovery. After high school in 1985, he flew to Quebec and rode his bicycle back home to Augusta. “It was a lonely trip, but I met all kinds of people on the