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Patricia Patterson’s work is a symbolic metaphor for life’s ordinary things. Each piece evokes the transitory aspects of life, which normally remain unremarked. Patterson deals with an existence that has no place in history; a conversation, a dream in bed, a dog rolling on a lawn. Mundane snap-shots of personal moments in time affect an astute personal viewpoint in Patterson’s work. In particular, visions of Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, west of Gallaway, has given Patterson fuel for many of her paintings.

“Those years that I spent in Aran are the only time when I didn’t have a job, and it was extraordinary because I could just observe life being lived and I think that’s the theme that’s very,very important to me. It’s pretty much like the Buddhist perception that what we really have is now and what’s happening now, and to be able to see it in a very pared-down situation — which was what I had there — all the small changes in weather and exchanges between people, people and animals, and obviously any changes in myself, all the changes a 20-year-old would be having. I want to engage with that subject matter and develop it more fully. There’s lots I still think and feel about the place.”

-Patricia Patterson, San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyles, August 2007, page 172

Patterson was schooled from 1959-1961 at Parsons School of Design, New York, she moved to San Diego in 1971 with her husband, the late Manny Farber, to teach at the University of California at San Diego. Patterson has shown with Quint Contemporary Art, Holly Solomon Gallery, Newspace and the San Diego Museum of Art.

For Patterson, art equals life and domestic life equals art. Her paintings are scenarios, reflecting the connectedness of family, friends and the earth.

Like a planet subject to the gravitational pull of two different suns, Patricia Patterson was long torn between mutually exclusive sources of nourishment and attachment: the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, where she lived as a young student and returned a dozen times over the course of 30 years; and her life in the U.S., fully engaged as an artist, teacher, writer and partner to film critic and painter Manny Farber.

Ultimately, Patterson chose both, thus the title of her first retrospective exhibition, “Here and There, Back and Forth,” at the California Center for the Arts museum in Escondido (through June 30).

“It was a conundrum, something to solve,” she said, taking a break from the installation of the show last month. “It was always a kind of emotional turmoil, because I loved [Ireland] so much, and yet all my life I had so much here. I really did love the world there as much as anything I’ve ever experienced.”

Quint Contemporary Art has had several addresses in the past 30 years, but wherever it has been — downtown, Mission Hills, the Miramar area or La Jolla — the gallery has been a space you just had to visit. My history of seeing shows there spans 24 years; and from the first, I sensed that Mark Quint was the real thing, with his enormous passion for art and artists.

Happily, that intuition proved correct. But who knew that he was going to be able to sustain his space(s) for so long, in a town where collectors of serious contemporary art aren’t exactly plentiful?

It isn’t easy to pinpoint how he has accomplished this. But there are certain qualities that have worked in his favor: a keen eye for artists of vision and substance; the desire to stick with them; a curiosity about new artists; and a personality that appeals to museum professionals, collectors and, yes, critics, too. He was also willing to bring artists from afar for residencies (in partnership with Michael Krichman), which yielded a string of memorable shows.

QUINT: Three Decades of Contemporary Art

at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum

August 15 – December 31, 2009

Special preview Saturday, August 15th from 6 – 9PM

340 N. Escondido Blvd.
Escondido, CA 92025
www.artcenter.org

Cocktails, hors d’ oeuvres, entertainment & live music.
$10 per person for non-members, free to Center Members.

RSVP to (760) 839-4120

The California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum is pleased to present Quint: Three Decades of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, based on the program of one of San Diego County’s most influential galleries, will open on August 15th and continue through December 31st, 2009. Works in the exhibition, the majority of which have been borrowed from Southern California museums and private collections, present an extraordinary survey of the range of regional, national, and international artists supported and promoted by Quint Gallery over nearly thirty years.

Since opening his first gallery in La Jolla in 1981, Mark Quint adopted a unique, almost nomadic approach to the business of contemporary art. Rather than establishing itself in a permanent location and then expanding over time, Quint Gallery would more often adapt its spaces and program according to the needs of the artists it was interested in presenting. From formal gallery and raw open spaces in downtown San Diego, to large industrial workspaces for artists near Miramar Naval Air Base, to unexpected (and often elegant) spaces secluded in back alleys in Hillcrest or La Jolla, Quint Gallery has maintained the flexibility to represent artists employing a wide variety of practices, mediums, and formats.

Fifty seems like a reasonable number of artists for an exhibition meant to offer a mini-panorama of the San Diego art scene. It should be said that this show at Quint Contemporary Art is not a look at the wider regional scene that would encompass Tijuana; its title, “Homing In: An Exhibition of 50 San Diego Artists,” can be taken literally, for the most part.

One of the artists – and a very good one – does live in Tijuana: Iana Quesnell. But she emerged and went to grad school in San Diego, so the name of the exhibition doesn’t mislead much.

There’s a single work by each artist on view at Quint, and one might suspect that the show would be weighted toward the local ones that usually show there. You’d be correct in this line of thinking.

Nonetheless, Quint has long shown at least some of the best local artists, such as Jean Lowe, Kim MacConnel, Patricia Patterson and Jay Johnson. Happily, many of the picks from outside its stable in “Homing In” are also good ones.

The work of San Diego’s top tier contemporary artists hasn’t been seen in the same place at the same time since 1985, when the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art presented  “A San Diego Exhibition: Forty-Two Emerging Artists.”  

Quint Contemporary Art brings this long drought to an end with HOMING IN: An Exhibition of 50 San Diego Artists. The show presents paintings, photographs, video and sculpture; features abstraction and representation; and offers moods ranging from hot to cool – all in formats less than 24” wide due to the limited space available.  

Some of the exhibition’s artists are in their fifties, sixties and older; and were part of the La Jolla Museum’s survey nearly a quarter century ago.  The exhibition’s younger artists, those in their twenties, thirties, and forties may have no recollection whatsoever of that earlier survey.   

This exhibition is organized by gallery director Ben Strauss-Malcolm and in a move that’s unusual in the competitive world of contemporary art galleries he invited many artists affiliated with other local galleries to participate in order to make the exhibition more reflective of the full gamut of work coming out of studios in the San Diego region.