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Patricia Cole has shared an article with you on The Huffington Post:
Link: 12 Paintings of Women, 12 Studio Visits
Sally Gaule's opening remarks for 'Fresh', Gordart Gallery, Johannesburg, ZA
I am very pleased to open this exhibition: firstly because i admire the work of painters for the freedom that they have, to collect and present their very own take on the world, and secondly because she lives the enviable life of a full time artist. A painter can fill the canvas at will, take or leave what they desire, layer or edit over time, and above all, they may change their mind. This is not the case for the photographer—they must wait for things to come before them, and take them as they are, there can be no new inclusions, no changing the mind—so i think ultimately we begin at different ends of the spectrum. I envy too the tactile quality of pat’s paintings, a smudge a drip, a brush loaded with paint, the colour seems crushed—she tells me it is the colour of Johannesburg— the colour of our soil, of the bark of the acacia tree, but the touch is light—layered but never laboured, subtly speaking to their substance as paint.
If you drive from Carr Street in Newtown into Del La Rey street, you pass underneath a railway bridge where a mural upon the walls depicts fragments of Fietas’s past—an old tram, figures, pigeons, a pattern that derives from the Dokrat’s wall paper, that adorned their walls in the 1950s. It reminds me of Pat’s paintings in the way that she collects experiences and objects of her visits to South Africa, and presents them in her paintings in a new guise for our contemplation. Patterns, birds, a hat, figures, herself, that stand for the exchange(s) she’s had here, that she experienced. Once, when we visited the Waterberg together, and being delayed by traffic getting through Pretoria we followed directions, it was way after dusk when we found the carport, but it was so dark that night we couldn’t find the house—in fact, i had to phone the owner and ask him where it was! During this exchange Pat look up at the sky, and saw the milky way in a spectacular conglomeration/matrix of stars streaming above us, a phosphorescent sea in the sky whose luminosity surprised and delighted us, and which i recall appeared soon after in one of her paintings. It is this sense of looking, and of drawing attention to the act of looking that i find most compelling in Pat’s work.
Roland Barthes once wrote, Whatever the metamorphoses of painting, whatever the support and the frame, we are always faced with the same question: what is happening there? Whether we deal with canvas, paper or wall, we deal with a stage where something is happening (and if, in some forms of art, the artist deliberately intendes that nothing should happen, even this is an event, an adventure). So that we must take a painting (let us keep this convenient name, even if it is an old one) as a kind of traditional stage: the curtain rises, we look, we wait, we receive, we understand; and once the scene is finished and the painting removed, we remember: we are no longer what we were: as in ancient drama, we have been initiated.
The drawn curtain you will notice in some of these works emphasises this quality of the stage, and of painting that reveals another space beyond the surface of the painting. Not just that, but the scenario that we are presented with contains some recurring elements: the leaves of trees, the portrait—or self portrait, the skull or skeleton. I forget who said this, but i think it is apt to say it here: ‘One of the qualities that is always present in great art is that while abounding with life, it is an intimation of death’. To me the works convey an aspect of time, time past, present and future—she seems to be conducting a dialogue with different aspects of herself, of different selves almost, over time.
It is said that we do not miss what we have never known. That a caged bird does not miss its freedom if it has never experienced free flight. But I think there is another side to that assertion: and that is that some of us occasionally experience an inexplicable and overwhelming sense of loss—a longing for something we have never known, in fact we don’t know what we are longing for, yet at same time we have a palpable sense of its absence. Pat’s paintings articulate this sense for me, like very few others.