Pop Art

“Do you know that the Campbell’s Soup Company has not sent me a single can of soup?”

— Andy Warhol

I took four of my fave quirky photographs and put them together to make this collage. To me, they just seemed right for each other. I ran across the two crazy clock store window displays one day in Paris. I absolutely loved them. French store windows are always works of art!

The soup cans were done in celebration of Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell Soup can painting. I bought the cans just for the pure joy of the art!

Last, but not least, two of my pairs of Soludos espradrilles which are the staple of my summer wardrobe. If I can’t be in France, I can bring some of Provence to my house!

~ Patty

Red Cowgirl Boots

“If a girl wants to grow up to be a cowgirl, she ought to be able to do it, or else this world ain’t worth living in.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

You can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the girl.  I saw these red cowgirl boots at a vintage fair recently and was immediately transported back to being 12 years old — the year my dad  gave me a horse for Christmas.  If I had owned a pair of these red cowgirl boots then, I would have been in heaven!   Me …the skinny girl with the beanpole legs!  I would have looked like Olive Oil…

~ Patty

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Things Go Better With Coke

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

— Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.

When I was a kid growing up in East Texas, I would get off the yellow school bus after school and walk to the little country store near my house. Of course, that involved crossing a four-lane divided highway to get there! I can’t believe my mother let me do that.

The store was the home of one of those big metal soft drink dispensers where you put in your change, slid the bottle horizontally and when you got it to the end, BINGO, there was the ice cold bottle of Coke! What could be better to go with a Baby Ruth? Nice childhood memory…

– Patty

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Mystery of the Mystery Girls Solved….

I just wanted to write an update on my search for the Mystery Girls I posted about on August 25.  I found them!  Here’s the related story and the photographs I have since received from their cousin in Missouri.  It has been such a delight to “meet” Eunice and June’s relatives and get to see photos of them all grown up.  Unfortunately, June, the older sister, is no longer living, but Eunice is and lives in California.

One thing I noticed is that in the three photos when they were older than in my photo, they dressed alike, even though they weren’t twins.

It’s been such a fun journey finding out about them.  Thank you so much to Eunice and June’s family for solving my mystery.

~ Patty

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Love is a Strawberry Tart

“Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.”

– Kahlil Gibran

One of my favourite things to photograph is the beauty of what’s available behind the glass of a patisserie shelf.  Everything is a work of art and almost too lovely to actually eat.  Well, ALMOST too lovely to eat.  I’m afraid I show no mercy once I rescue one of these tasty little morsels …. I am a complete sucker for tarte fraise!

~Patty

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Vintage Beauties

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson

I got my new Nikon D810 last Saturday afternoon and I wanted to see how good it was in low light.  This is just how good it is. I walk past this photographer’s studio every day and love to look at the vintage cameras, so I took decided this would be my ‘test’ photograph.  This shop window, sitting in almost darkness, was a perfect choice!

~ Patty

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Truckin’ On

“I didn’t wait for Luck.  I tore after it with a truck.”

  — A. A. Bell, Diamond Eyes

I just treated myself to a new Nikon D810 and this is one of the first photographs I took with it.  I was down in The Rocks area of downtown Sydney, which is the site of the original settlement.  I had already seen this truck at a stoplight and photographed it up close, but then I ran across it again a little while later.  Love the whitewall tires!

 ~ Patty

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Lemon Temptation

“As one who appreciated the tragic side of eating, it seemed to him that anything other than fruit for dessert implied a reprehensible frivolity, and cakes in particular ended up annihilating the flavour of quiet sadness that must be allowed to linger at the end of a great culinary performance.”
― Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, La soledad del manager

Every morning when I stop off at the cafe near my office to have my breakfast, this is what I find staring me in the face…such competition for a bacon and egg roll, it’s very hard to resist!  But, I use my willpower and make do with just photograping these beautiful tarts!

~ Patty

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Spring Has Sprung

“I gave her flour instead of a flower, because I knew she loved homophones.”

— Jarod Kintz, My love can only occupy one person at a time

I still find it hard to think of September as the beginning of spring.  The reversal of seasons continues to be strange to me even after living in Australia for 20+ years.

~ Patty

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Shades of Brown

“A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in. A minute to smile and an hour to weep in. A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, And never a laugh but the moans come double. And that is life. A crust and a corner that makes love precious, With a smile to warm and tears to refresh us, And joy seems sweeter when cares come after, And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter. And that is life.”
― Paul Laurence Dunbar

 An angel in Saint Eustache church in Paris, urban decay and bread in Newtown, Australia, and Shakespeare’s Bookstore in Paris….lovely shades of brown.

~ Patty

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Never Enough

“Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don’t in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

I photographed this piece in Fitzroy this past Christmas. It was done by two talented Melbourne street artists, Rone and Wonderlust.  We used another one of Rone’s beautiful women on the cover of our first book, and I made a point of searching out his work in Melbourne.

~Patty

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http://www.everfreshstudio.com/blog/never-enough-rone-wonderlust/

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The Wild Bunch

“The only good cage is an empty cage.”
― Lawrence Anthony, The Elephant Whisperer

I don’t think I could say anything more than this…

~ Patty

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The Horse in Striped Pajamas

“There’s no limit to how much you’ll know depending on how far beyond Zebra you go!”

  — Dr. Suess

Zebras hold a certain weird fascination for me.  The stripes are hypnotic and each zebra’s markings are so different…like the fingerprints of humans.

~ Patty

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Don’t forget to look up

I had never seen Forgotten Songs photographed at night. This is a totally amazing photograph! What a talented photographer!

Angel Eyes

“There is a place so pure and true, beyond your deep and restless thoughts you’ll find an imaginative longitude for dear shelter, completely lost in time… It’s made of love, of magic dreams, where you can be yourself and free… Where roses of white and scarlet bloom…tranquility, waves kissing shore… A place you’ll never want to leave, a place for dreamers to believe… So, spread the wings and let your soul fly up high and reach your castle in the sky…”
― Oksana Rus

The winged angel photograph was taken in Paris at one of my favourite museums, the Carnavalet.  It’s very unassuming, as museums go.  Not like one of those flashy, over-the-top museums like the Louvre, which is every tourist’s de rigeur place to visit when they hit Paris.  No, the Carnavalet is a little secret oasis where you can go spend time learning about the history of Paris…and it’s absolutely free.   

I was chuffed to get this shot of one of the giraffes at the Sydney Zoo this past year.  I caught him just as he was entering his enclosure and it reminded me of how parents measure how tall their children are as they are growing up…marking their height on the wall.

The other photograph was taken in Paris at one of the hidden passageways I discovered while taking a street photography class.  I liked the deer antlers on the dear sign.  Quite clever!

~ Patty

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