Patricia Wheeler

Residency: Nov. 2011 through Jan.,2012:

Project Description

The series of paintings is called Lunar Coda: Song of Transformation.Materials: limestone clay on board, acrylic paint & cold waxsecond series: works on paper, title, Chaotic Node

NOTES:

Each day I walk to the river gathering bits and pieces of nature. I am a ritualist who works intuitively. Using ashes from the wood stove I bundle the objects together, stitch, glue and wax them, each bundle like a kernel of the whole land. I am thinking of transition states of consciousness and I am reading.

I receive field notes from Fred Swanson and from Kurt Fausch to intersect in my work..Excerpts: “the real percussionist start clattering out a beat with pebbles …all the while the rain slaps on the stream, etc.” Notartions appear in my paintings as text and gesture, the marks of rain. Pebbles are inserted into the recessed niche.When Fred visits he demonstrates the term imbrication by stacking the stones in the niche the way the river would.

I read a prayer aloud, a blessing and draw a cruciform in ashes, a marker of the place of death. “Spirit of living water…… Spirit of the tides, remind me of the rise and fall of your rhythms”..etc.

Rachel Carson wrote, “We all, at last, return to the sea.”

Biography

Patricia Wheeler lives on a small island in Maine in the Penobscot Bay Region. She is a mixed media painter, a feminist and one who believes that each of us has a purpose in life which is the song that is in our heart.  Using an abstract vocabulary she looks for intersections between unrelated elements within a painting. She exhibits widely throughout the U.S. And teaches regularly  at the Oregon College of Art & Crafts, the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology,  the Peninsula Art School, Door County,WI,the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts,Deer Isle, ME, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art & Chapter Two Gallery, Maine. She has been selected for numerous artist residencies. Pat graduated from Rutgers University with high honors in studio art.