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Julie Green

The Arts Center Exhibit(s):

• '9th Around Oregon Annual Exhibition,' October, 2011

Statement:

To date, twenty-five phone portraits of Oregon State University students, faculty, and staff have been painted.  The variations in screen images, apps, and brands become a portrait of each individual. Even owning a smart phone is part of the mix: at OSU, the President, Provost, and our Dean carry Blackberries instead.

Photo references, shot with an iPhone, are used to produce this series that examines our screwball relationship with technology. Why, for example, would someone who hates talking on the phone paint phones?

Studio time is divided between egg tempera painting, phones, and an ongoing ceramics project. The Last Supper plates illustrate nearly 500 final meal requests of US death row inmates. While the plates are quite different than the paintings, both are observations of contemporary society. I am driven to the studio to make some sense of our world. Andy Warhol said the artist of the future will simply point. I paint to point.

Biography:

Julie Green was born in Japan in 1961. Green has had 25 solo exhibitions in this country and abroad, and is a 2011 Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors nominee.  Her work has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, Gastronomica, and Wired magazine. An Associate Professor at Oregon State University, Green lives in the Willamette Valley with her husband, artist Clay Lohmann, and their one-eyed cat.

Visit Julie Green's website.