About me
Early, in 1954, I picked up a pencil & sat in front of the TV with Jon Gnagy’s New Television Art Book and my stack of white envelopes, ready to learn to draw. I learned how to shade cones, cylinders, & cubes, while hearing about the principals of perspective. Jon believed that everyo...
Early, in 1954, I picked up a pencil & sat in front of the TV with Jon Gnagy’s New Television Art Book and my stack of white envelopes, ready to learn to draw. I learned how to shade cones, cylinders, & cubes, while hearing about the principals of perspective. Jon believed that everyone has a time in their life when the Art Spirit is dominant, I suppose I was right on target & the seed was sown.
Crayons, colored pencils, tracing paper & coloring books, gave way to pen & ink & I begged my mother to purchase art lessons from Art Instruction, Inc. in Minneapolis, Minn. around 1962. You know the one,with the draw the pirate contest. I won, I think everyone won, but my Mom paid the $500.00 & in a few weeks a huge box arrived, with an oak adjustable drawing table, (which I still own) pads of paper, pen tips, charcoal sticks, watercolors, brushes, a Deluxe Bear Brand compass, a wooden T square & my first palette knife, which continues to be my favorite tool. I finished every lesson & mailed off the homework to be critiqued, by H. Okins, my instructor. After the first year, I received a Certificate of Accomplishment, & was urged to keep going. Another student of this school, was Charles M Schulz, I was in good company. From that humble beginning, I continued through my whole life, painting, & drawing, constantly moving forward, on my journey through art.
Through several successful art related businesses, I have painted on walls, furniture, pottery, fabric, wicker, and glass. A chest of drawers, based on a Neoclassical Commode from 1770 is in London, England & two chests recreating Charles Wysocki’s early American style are somewhere in France. I’ve painted realistic folded curtains on hardboard, Jack Russell dogs & race horses on terra cotta pottery, orchid botanicals in watercolor, & on clay tiles for table tops, pine boughs on truck cabs, kites, birds & clouds on ceilings, and also antique furniture,refinished with milk paint.
Today, my work is abstract on hardboard, continuing to be self-educated, I am ever as always moving forward. My work has been shown from coast to coast in many galleries & recently a painting was shipped to an office in Hong Kong, during the Olympics.
Today and for the past 9 yrs., I have woven strings of color onto board with the same palette knife from childhood, creating surfaces of deconstructed relief, crumbling stucco, and contemporary fresco. My paintings have been highly influenced by Jackson Pollock, Anselm Kiefer, Joaquin Sorolla, Pierre Redoute,Tosha Tudor, Marjolein Bastin & Marcia Myers. In studying their work and other contemporary artists, I began what was to be the backbone of my current style with a surface I can’t walk away from.
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Beautiful work Patricia