PATTERNS AND TONES

"Artemis" © Julie Pavlowski Green Over the years, I have enjoyed reinterpreting characters from well known texts. They are imbued with such history and context that it is can be an interesting exercise to cast them in modern terms. They share the same trials and tribulations we face today.  Often, their collective emotional temperaments reflect our own society of the day. If we are familiar with the text, we can identify with the interpretation of the character being presented.  Cosmogony (creation of the world), Theogony (the birth of the gods) and Mans interpretation of these ideas in art are of particular interest to me. As humans, we have always tried to understand our surroundings and give meaning to our exsistance. How an individual approaches their work and what they choose to explore fascinates me.  What subject an artist chooses, the props and costumes used and the setting reveals the aesthetic of the individual creating the art. Even when ...

"Whacky Packet"  © Julie Pavlowski Green  I began to read Tom Wolfe's book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" on one overcast Saturday morning on a small excursion my friends and I had planned to take the night before. It was about 1/2 hour into the ride down Highway 1 that I cracked the book open as we wound our way south. We decided after driving around for a few hours that we should stop for lunch. We took the next exit. It lead us to the sleepy little town of La Honda.  A town none of us had visited before. We ended up eating our sandwiches at a local park which had an unusual fire pit with horseshoes embedded on the rim and a strange little log cabin on the property. Suddenly, I felt the googly-eyed paper glasses in my pocket which I had absentmindedly placed in my pocket on the way out the door. With camera in hand, I decided to persuade my friends to let me photograph them wearing the glasses.             ...

 "The Photo Place - 29 Palms"  © Julie Pavlowski Green It all started inside of a hippopotamus's mouth. It was my brother's 2nd birthday and we were celebrating it at the Oakland Zoo. My Mother was busy setting up the party and I distinctly remember her handing me her instamatic camera, you know the horizontal flat one that you could attach a flash cube to, and asked me to take pictures of the birthday party for her. Several weeks later, we drove up to the local Fotomat to pick up our processed prints (which was always an exciting moment) but was even more of an event, as it was the first time we were picking up photographs taken by me! After my Mother paid for the prints, she pulled over and parked so we could take a look at all the pictures I had taken at my brother's birthday party. I was bursting with excitement as I knew the images were going to amaze my Mother and possibly impress her enough to let me use the camera again. The look on her fa...