Patricia Schappler

Bedford, NH USA

Website: patriciaschappler.com
Facebook: @pattischappler
Instagram: @patriciaschappler
Pinterest: @pschappler

Art Medium: contemporary figurative painting, figure drawing, portraits, mixed media

Vocabulary of Near
oil on canvas
36 inches W x 60 inches H

Labrynth
oil on board
60.25 x 48 inches

Three Drops
Oil on canvas
60 x 36 inches

City of Taras
oil and collage on board
42 x 48 inches

Painting the Figure Now Kimono
oil, pastel, shellac on paper
48 x 36 inches

The Guardian
pastel
44 x 30 inches

The Young Giant
pastel
33W x 47H

Self
oil on board
12x12 inches

My imagery focuses on the drawn and painted figure in shallow, often collaged spaces. I work from family and friends and am encouraged by the narrative that naturally accompanies a psychologically driven subject. Merging my love of Western sensual form with Eastern, flat patterned design, I alternate between depth and surface to create pictorial tension. If the human figure within the narrative of home are my starting points, uncovering where home is held, how we share it, and how it shifts through event, archetype, and fictionalized story, are part of the journey made visible through tools and process. Photography provides the raw material of day to day and accompanies working from life.

Moving between the two sources contrasts between the external, detailed information of the photo, with the textural complexity of observed space, material shifts, and internal felt and thought, process. The act of creation shuffles between the real, touchable, and enterable spaces of the physical world I know, with the more transparent, shifting world of memories and adaptation. Through layered surface, I hope to extend time, communicated through complex imagery. The energy of these spaces creates a hybrid of worlds; a contrast of heavy and light, flat and formed, still and mobile. Parallel to my own experience of living, the world is one of transformation and in the state of becoming. Whether sourced from biblical, familial, or fairytale; the narrative remains the same; connected histories in an ongoing love story.