Who curates those TED talks? Juliet Blake is fascinated by people, a passion that informs both her work and her portrait collection.
When I ask TED’s Juliet Blake how she came to have a wall full of portraits in her Brooklyn home, she responds wonderfully, with asides embedded in digressions: “I grew up in the north of England, and my sister was 17 years older (she’s an Academy Award-winning costume designer)—and I was convinced for the longest time she was my mother, which really screwed me up, but it turned out I just had very old parents and was a late mistake. But anyway, my sister was a really good painter, and I now have a lot of her work in my house, and so I sort of grew up in a quite artistic environment, and my earliest memories are of her painting, or of her work on the walls.” Following an early family trip to the National Portrait Gallery in London, a special love of portraiture was born.
