June Emerson was born in London in 1937. Art, writing and music were favourite subjects at school, but music was the most important. In 1971 she started June Emerson Wind Music a music publishing and international distribution business, specialising in music for wind instruments. Alongside this she is a bassoonist, writes books and articles (mainly travel and music) and has done several broadcasts for the BBC. She visited Albania often and when the communist régime fell in 1991 she founded The Albanian Musicians’ Trust to help musicians who were suffering hardship.

In the 1980s through friendship with an artistic family (Trevelyan/Fedden) her interest in art was reawakened and greatly broadened. In 1998 she went on an intensive two-week course at The Painting School of Montmiral in France, and the tutor Francis Pratt made her feel that she had some potential. From 1999-2001 she did a Foundation Course in Art and Design, and in 2005 completed a Fine Art course at York College. Since then she has exhibited and sold work both in the UK and abroad.

In 2022 she completed a journey along the Line of Longitude 2 Degrees West, from the Dorset coast to the north of Scotland, making images all the way, to create a book ‘Following the Line’. Taking the cue from David Hockney, these travelling pictures were made using one finger on a computer touch-pad.

“I want my work to express the richness and excitement that I find in life. From a chance beginning: a shape, a gesture, splash or trickle, I explore and develop it, using colour and texture, until it becomes something that I had never thought of before. I love surprises.”

‘Colour in a painting is like enthusiasm in life.’ – Van Gogh.

‘I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.’ – Robert Frost