Patricia Altschul
Patricia Altschul was born in Hempstead, NY and raised in Palo Alto, CA. She earned both her BA and MFA, with an emphasis in painting, at UCDavis, where she studied with Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri, Cornelia Schulz, Robert Arneson, Ralph Johnson, Jackie Winsor, and others. She subsequently worked in Togo, West Africa for USAID, taught art at the Southside Art Center, in the Sacramento City School District, conducted independent workshops in drawing, and was for 11 years an adjunct faculty member in the art department at American River College where she taught painting, drawing and design.
Patricia Altschul’s work has been shown locally and nationally and is in numerous private and corporate collections. She is currently represented by the b.Sakata Garo Gallery in Sacramento, CA
Patricia Altschul works in a garden studio in Sacramento, CA where she is distracted by stray birds, her dog Fiep, and the changing seasons.
Artist Statement
My working images begin with drawings and studies created from the synthesis of collected memories and photographs. The photographs act as a map, illuminating questions of gesture, perspective and structure drawn from the narrative of memory. My studies are followed by larger paintings, though sometimes the studies themselves become the final image.
My interest is in the transient moment, the fleeting expression, the history of time as it crosses a face, passes through a body at rest or at work. How does a figure tell a story? How can it illuminate a moment in time that speaks to something larger, just out of reach?
My paintings endeavor to be illustrations of the architecture of human solitude, the archeology of the soul, and the limitless realms of internal worlds mostly hidden from us. Images of an inhabited silence, the poetry of solitude (not loneliness), and of how we take root in the world day after day. Of the silent bonds that connect us and the evanescent moment between before and after.
The human figure is a landscape of time, and so my paintings become a form of landscape painting. Within are passages of abstraction and pentimenti - a testimony of the visible history of the work.
My paintings are a way to illustrate an abstraction of time and of our presence in time. They are about the “voluptuousness of looking”1. Finally, they are about the process of painting itself.
1. Attributed to Mario Rossi in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
At Tusen Takk
While at Tusen Takk I intend to use the quiet of the solitary residency to explore working in and with water-based media, primarily gouache, teaching myself the techniques required to work in the image language I currently create with oil based paint. It is my hope to create a series of works echoing the luminous surface quality of the Italian frescoes of the early renaissance, for example those of Piero della Francesca, Pisanello, Loernzetti, Mantegna, and of the Castle Roncolo in Bolzano. I expect to work on paper in varying sizes, with the intention of mounting the finished work on wood panels.
Related News
