Julian Block was born in New York in 1923. Educated at New York's famed Industrial Arts High School, by his teens he was already earning money with his brush. After serving in the Pacific in WWII, he studied at New York's Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. An early career as an illustrator eventually led him to fine arts and to painting.

After being represented over the last four decades in one-man and group shows in galleries from New York to San Francisco, his paintings now hang in collections in London, Hamburg, New York, Palm Beach, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as in the US Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs.