Ravi in Michigan, USA:
"Although this is my first testimonial, I have commissioned Julianne three times now. Her paintings are a real source of joy for my family and me, and now also for a close colleague of mine in South America. My husband and I are both field scientists with projects overseas—he works in Indonesian rainforests and I work in the mountains of Patagonia. We both have strong emotional connections to the places we work, which are breathtakingly beautiful and filled with natural and cultural wonders. Sadly, though, we do sometimes get so caught up in our work that we temporarily lose sight of how spectacular these places really are—a literal missing of the forest for the trees, in my husband's case!
Julianne captured perfectly the light, essence and beauty of both places, which is remarkable given how vastly different they are, not to mention the fact that she's never experienced them in person! Now we can be transported to the far corners of the earth, and into our wonderful memories, from the unhurried comfort of our living room. This means so much to us that, after commissioning Julianne for paintings of Indonesia and Patagonia, I wanted to share this feeling with a colleague who isn't able to go to the field as much as he once did. Julianne painted an amazing picture of a place that is very special to him; I know he will cherish this gift."
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Tom in New York, USA:
"Commissioning a painting is an opportunity to express what you like and what's important to you. In my case, I got that opportunity because I needed paintings for my office. I've always been fascinated by the sculptor Auguste Rodin -- his best works are studies of people in intense situations, serious, familiar, but worth looking at again and again. Rodin's sculptures are all over the world, and I've been lucky enough to take photographs of some of them at outdoor sculpture gardens in Washington DC, New York City, Purchase New York, and Hakone Japan. I commissioned Julianne to paint four of them -- the Thinker, the Burghers of Calais, Balzac, and Eve -- composed in a way that the viewer could get a sense of the place as well as of the sculpture itself. Julianne's work exceeded my expectations -- they are great! She got the reflections on the bronze and the anatomical details just right. Guests to my office praise them, ask me to tell them all about each one, and want to know where I got them.
Julianne has a wonderful sense of Maine, where she lives. Her paintings of water, rocks, shorelines, and light reflecting on water are amazing. The Rodin paintings show Julianne's range as an artist -- she's not afraid to tackle unusual or difficult commissions, and she does them well. I'm really happy that she painted these for me!"
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Susan in Georgia, USA:
"I took my pictures with a point-and-click camera and a non-artist's eye: Two pictures from the island of Crete, where I had dreamed of going for over fifty years....and one picture from the Acropolis in Athens, not of the Parthenon, but of some fallen columns and a few flowers growing amongst them. So these amateur photos attempted to catch and hold some of the meaning of my trip for me -- a pilgrimage, a vision-quest?? One of the pictures from Crete showed a statue of Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote Zorba the Greek and fixed the island in our collective mind forever. The statue shows a seemingly tortured figure -- it is black and casts a shadow in the clear, bright sunlight. In the photo all the facts are there. But in the painting, meaning begins to emerge. And that is why I am having trouble coming up with words to describe the transmutation to another medium. With her eye and hand, Julianne has taken the facts of my amateur photographs and turned them into art. The forms and colors are there, but the spirit that animates them is new. They are the same, but profoundly different. The photo has been translated into a shaped reality that pulses. Look at the flowers among the fallen columns -- or at Kazantzakis, the statue and the shadow. And look at the carved ram, atop a small shrine -- Julianne has captured and highlighted a whimsy that animates the creature and yet grounds him firmly in his world -- other stones not shaped by human hands, but still alive. My trip to Crete and Athens was a spiritual journey for me, and I am grateful to Julianne for seeing the meaning of my photos and making art, valuable and lasting, for me and my family to enjoy and appreciate forever. Thank you, Julianne!"
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