Pat earned a B.A. in studio art at Macalester College in St. Paul, where she studied with painter Jerry Rudquist. She received an M.F.A. in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and she is a founding member of WARM, the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota. In 1999, she received a Visual Arts Travel and Study Grant from the Jerome, General Mills and Dayton Hudson Foundations to travel to Pompeii, Italy, to view the ancient Roman fresco at the Villa of the Mysteries. This inspired her series of paintings, "The Mysteries." Her most recent series, titled the "The Catherine Portrait," includes paintings of colleagues, students and staff at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, where Pat is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History. Along with Elizabeth Erickson, Pat has also been the director of the Women’s Art Institute at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for the past eleven years.
"My interest in painting portraits comes from the long history of portraits in the western art tradition. Like these forebears, I aim to capture not only a likeness of an individual, but something characteristic of her or his personality. Often these qualities emerge in the act of painting, and I go along with it, enjoying the ride. I am also conscious of contemporary approaches to the picture plane, especially the interaction of color. To enliven the surface, I paint warm skin tones over an underpainting of blues, creating tension, yet delighting the eye." |
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