About Patty Porter

Patty Porter grew up in a manufacturing town in Pennsylvania. Her parents were always making things. Her father was building and repairing houses; her mother knitted, crocheted, or sewed. Porter displayed a similar need. As a child she always had paper, crayons, scissors, glue, and tape and spent hours cutting and manipulating paper into houses, farms, and landscapes. As an adult artist, she feels a strong need to create through painting.

She studied to be an art teacher at Kutztown State (now Kutztown University of Pennsylvania), and began teaching art in Ithaca elementary schools in the late sixties. She thought of herself then as more "craft-oriented"; she bought a loom, and when she was not teaching or caring for her two young children, she spun her own yarn and used it to weave tapestries with texturally varied surfaces. Eventually, a desire to "be pictorial" began to surface in the weaving, and she began to explore other media.

Painting classes with Gillian Pedderson-Krag in the early nineties reintroduced Porter to oil painting. She remembers being impressed by Pedderson-Krag's ability to capture the emotional relationships between the elements in a still life, while at the same time acknowledging traditional principles of design within the painting. She describes the search for those relationships as the trajectory of her own work.

During the nineties, as her family responsibilities diminished, she was able to devote more time to the study of painting. She began to search out other contemporary painters whose work interested her. This search took her to La Rochelle, France to study alla prima painting with Kim English. Subsequent trips to Taos, New Mexico to study with Skip Whitcomb and Mark Daily opened her eyes to the vast differences in atmospheres and light across various locations. During a painting trip to Dingle, Ireland, she encountered penetrating mists and varieties of greens that she could not previously have imagined.

As her technical skill and sensibilities developed she found herself moving from still life to landscape painting. She finds great satisfaction in being immersed in the light and the atmosphere. She does not think of herself as "composing" the landscape she paints. She gives credit to Nature for that. It is the part of the landscape that she chooses to paint that speaks to her sensibilities. When she experiences a powerful section of a landscape she tries to capture the spirit of the place in a way that invites the viewer in and asks that they stay a while as a retreat from their present circumstances.