Patricia Perry

Painting

“I love the smell of [oil] – the buttery texture … and the depth of texture you get with it.”

Patricia Perry paints a little bit of everything – but right now she’s focusing on still life.  Perry refers to still-life paintings in the classical sense – works of art which usually depict an inanimate object such a bowl of fruit. Perry, born in the US, moved to Europe when she was 19.  She lived in Bad Homburg, Germany and studied at the Goethe Institut in Kochel am See before moving to Paris for a year and enrolling at the American College in Paris.

Inspired by the works of Goya, Rembrandt, Turner and Blake which she saw in museums, she enrolled as an art student at UCLA after returning to the U.S. There she studied under noted abstract artist, Richard Diebenkorn, who came to define the California school of Abstract Expressionism of the early 1950s.

After graduating with a BA in fine art from UCLA, she worked at the UCLA Art Galleries and the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum.  In 1976 she moved with her husband and children to West Virginia, continuing her practice of the craft of oil painting.

She says that her still life work “concerns itself with the essential but unacknowledged connection we have with the everyday objects that inhabit our lives, whose fleeting beauty we may barely notice. In painting my still lifes, I aim to ‘still’ or open a moment in time to allow both the artist and the viewer an opportunity to stop and remain quiet, and to experience the reality of the present moment.”

Perry lives with her husband in Jefferson County, West Virginia. Her paintings are found in private collections in Philadelphia, Annapolis, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Pasadena, and Shepherdstown, West Virginia. She teaches oil painting at the Washington Street Gallery in Charles Town, West Virginia.