Julian Hope
Julian Hope Fine Arts Student and Founder of The Wild Canvas Retreat is a storytelling artist and entrepreneur with a multifaceted career in the arts and business. She is currently launching her art retreat business in Puerto Rico, inspired by her recent participation in a prestigious Jeremy Mann art retreat in Barcelona, Spain. Julian designs immersive seven-day retreats that blend painting, personal storytelling, and culinary experiences, offering participants a unique space to create, connect, and grow. She incorporates her life experiences, including a near-drowning incident in Puerto Rico, into her retreats, using art as a conduit for reflection and expression. Her career background is diverse and dynamic. Julian previously founded and operated an on-call courier service in 2003, growing it to 15 clients with a team of seven drivers, then transitioned to managing a newspaper distribution district for seven years. Later, she trained in massage therapy and successfully owned and operated a spa in Charleston for four years. These entrepreneurial ventures provided her with invaluable experience in business operations, client relations, and team management, skills she now applies to her art retreat endeavors. Julian is a current fine arts student at Academy of Art University, focusing on drawing and painting, with a broader background in music, theater, and live art performance. She is deeply committed to using her personal journey, including the loss of her spouse 14 years ago, to inspire growth, resilience, and creative expression in both herself and others. She works closely with a life coach to develop her marketing strategy, website, and retreat logistics while building a dedicated team to bring her vision to life. Julian’s philosophy emphasizes self-reliance, accountability, and active manifestation, encouraging others to turn life experiences into purposeful action. She also shares her life with a 12-year-old service dog, a lab-boxer mix, who is a steadfast companion in her creative and professional endeavors.
• Selected by Jeremy Mann for Art Retreat in Barcelona
• Planning nonprofit foundation in Puerto Rico for fine arts students
What do you attribute your success to?
I look at manifestation as deciding what I want, going after it, doing the footwork, and making it happen. You don't sit around and wait for things to happen - it doesn't work that way. You have to go after it, you have to make it happen, you have to do your footwork. How bad do you want it? After going through cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR treatments, and serious work on myself following my husband's death, I finally convinced myself that I'm capable of doing whatever I set my mind to. I didn't look at my past successes - building a courier service, running a newspaper distributorship, opening a successful spa - as real achievements until I went to the hospital and went through all those therapies. Then it just hit me that I was capable of doing whatever I set my mind to, I just had to figure it out. Now I feel like I just manifest these things into my life by being bold, confident, and courageous. Since I decided to turn my life around and really live instead of just exist, everything has changed. People look at me differently, take me on differently, and accept me differently.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would just say, never think that you need somebody to help you get to where you're going, because everything that you need to get there is within yourself. And that's the truth.