Biography

Patricia Altschul was born in Hempstead, New York, grew up in Palo Alto, and now lives and works Sacramento, California. She taught at the Southside Art Center, and was an adjunct faculty member in the art department at American River College from 1989-2000, teaching painting drawing and design. In 1981 she worked in Togo, West Africa, establishing weaving cooperatives in various villages near Lama-Kara.

Her work has been shown locally as well as nationally. Currently she is represented by the b.Sakata Garo gallery in Sacramento, California

Artist Statement

Many working images begin with drawings and studies created from the synthesis of collected memories and photographs. The photographs act as a map, and illuminate questions of gesture, perspective, and structure drawn from the narrative of memory. These studies are followed by larger paintings, though sometimes the studies themselves become a final image.

Of primary interest is the transient moment, the fleeting expression, the history of time as it crosses a face, or passes through a body at rest or at work. How does that figure tell a story? How does it illuminate a moment of time that might speak to something larger and just out of reach.

These paintings endeavor to be illustrations of the architecture of human solitude, of the archeology of the soul, and of the limitless realms of internal worlds mostly hidden from us. Images of an inhabited silence, the poetry of solitude (not loneliness), of how we take root in the world day after day. Of the silent bonds that connect us, and of the evanescent moment between before and after.

The human figure is a landscape of time, and so the paintings become a form of landscape painting, within which are passages of abstraction and pentimenti, testimony of a visible history of the work.

The paintings are a way to illustrate an abstraction of time, and our presence IN time.

Finally, they are about the process of painting itself.