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Freddy Albert Julsing, born March 12, 1942 in Den Haag (The Hague), The Netherlands, was a unique character, and wrote his own short auto-bio (written below) after moving to California. It is here for your enjoyment and a bit of enlightenment as to who Freddy was.
“As a very young artist Freddy Julsing won the prestigious Jacob Marisprijs, The Hague’s Municipal Award for Art.
Immediately after that he decided to investigate the love of his life, the comic strip. He did so at the Toonder Studios in Amsterdam, the one and only spot in The Netherlands in those days where comic strip art was taken seriously.
There, Julsing became Marten Toonder’s closest assistant in the production of, in Europe, the very famous ‘Tom Poes’ newspaper strip. For six years he took care of the layouts and sketches on that strip.
After this educational period the time had come to start a career under his own name. Strips like ‘Wellington Wish,’ the ‘Brothers Samovarof & Company’, ‘Fanteasy’, ‘Witte’s Diary’, ‘Ukkie’, and ‘Tuimel & Ich’, were, among others, the result of this transition.
Julsing also adapted a considerable number of fairy tales, a humbling experience, as he describes it, which gave him the opportunity of getting a taste of what real, more archaic story-telling is about.
In 1992, Freddy Julsing barely escaped from the inferno caused by a crashed Martinair DC-10 in the south of Portugal. Realizing that this event represented the turning point of his life, he withdrew in order to ‘reinvent himself’. Everything in his life changed. He moved to California in 1997, where he settled with his wife Kay.”
Freddy’s art flowed from a depth within him that was strongly connected to a much higher power, a source of great Light.
He loved to work sitting at his desk with nature and sunlight streaming in the windows, and a hot cappuccino and cookies at his elbow.
This was Freddy’s style no matter where he was, always deriving inspiration from his natural surroundings.
All of his work was created by hand, paint and brush, or pen, many times using a magnifying glass allowing his creativity to flow freely and authentically.
Later, in California, he taught himself to use the computer and Photoshop and began experimenting with his hand drawings by scanning them into the computer, then adding actual photographs, and layering his work for an entirely new look.
Beertje Bertje is an example of his earliest experimentations with this layering process.
As one of Freddy’s friends in The Netherlands observed, his work could be distinguished as pre-crash and post-crash.
As Freddy himself pointed out he “withdrew” for five years after the plane crash in 1992 in order to “reinvent himself”.
Although his given name was Freddy Julsing, while living in The Netherlands he went by Fred Julsing, and chose to return to his given name of Freddy after moving to California.
Freddy created a huge body of art in The Netherlands, where one of his most famous and well loved characters was Ukkie, inspired by his daughter Deirdre.
He continued to expand his art after moving to CA in 1997. Diverse, light-hearted, yet deeply profound, his work was filled with beauty, joy, Light, and a deep sense of spiritual opening and expansion. His art spanned comic strips, spirituality, contemporary/modern, practical, philosophical, and metaphysical.
Professor Ich, along with his sidekick, Tuimel, were among the many of Freddy’s major comic strip characters. Freddy considered Professor Ich to be his playful alter-ego, so a lot of the ideas that Professor Ich brought through in these comic strips were, in fact, Freddy’s beliefs and ideas.
As Freddy’s illness progressed in 2004 so that he could no longer sit at his desk, he lamented that his greatest grief was not being able to do his
art. He kept on, however, by doodling wonderfully humorous sketches on
the small notepad kept by the bed.
The variety of his art reflects the variety of Freddy himself, like beautiful pieces of an exquisitely sparkling crystal. In Freddy’s art there is something for everyone.