Rainscapes: Drawings by Elizabeth Patterson

Taillights radiate the heat of the sun and the blue of the sky seems born of water.  Raindrops carve patterns across windshields by day and night.  Urban traffic jams, lonely long distance interstates, roads of all sizes and shapes unwind, acquire an otherworldly elegance via the precision of Elizabeth Patterson’s colored pencil or graphite pencil drawings.  Traveling across roadways washed with rain has never looked so profoundly desirable.

In a masterful display of technique, Patterson renders landscapes so close to ‘the real thing’ as to be unreal.  Often mistaken for photographs, her current work, as in her previous exhibitions, reflects a keen eye for composition and color.  While her new work continues to utilize the perspective of the car’s front windshield, the drawings have acquired a larger than life, and in some cases surreal, authority.  Not only larger in scale and bolder in execution, the works are more complex.  The artist renders water and light with sharp strokes or endless curves across the page and then layers them to create the illusion of a hard rain.  In so doing, she creates an abstraction of seeing presented as a representation of exactly what was seen.  With this artist and these works, seeing is definitely believing.

Ms. Patterson is a member of the Colored Pencil Society of America where her work has won numerous awards including the prestigious honor of signature status.  Earlier this year, the artist was featured in solo exhibition at Galerie Louis Carre in Paris, France. This exhibition marks her second solo outing with the gallery.