Pat San Soucie

Pat San Soucie Statement

I grew up looking through car windows as landscapes rolled past. In painting, I learned that you can evoke a landscape without representing it. By stepping back from realistic representation and by cultivating the random, I can be attentive to what’s happening on the paper and, at the same time, pay attention to how I’m feeling. A painting that’s not laboriously brushed, a painting that’s for the most part “poured” has a naturalness, a freshness, a spontaneity. I do, of course, use the brush. I add the brushstroke, the handwork, to the beautiful surface that’s been created by pours and other random processes. The handwork gives the painting the artist’s touch. The brush then reveals the peculiar poetry that I feel each artist has inside. When colors, textures and the quality of paint become more important than the particular edge of a leaf, the exploration of abstraction begins. When the poetry of abstraction is making a clear, strong statement to both painter and to viewer, the communication is complete and pleasurable. A winner of the Medal of Honor of the National Association of Women Artists and a Dolphin Fellow of the American Watercolor Society, Pat San Soucie says, “I’m a newspaper man’s daughter, so there’s almost always a story, but for me the story’s never linear; the painting’s never realistic.” San Soucie recently moved with her husband from New Jersey to Portland, Oregon. “We had begun married life in Eugene 45 years ago, but left to live in New York, Missouri and New Jersey. However, we never lost a fondness for the Oregon scene. I feel I just might grow up in this vast and energizing area because here everything, the mountains, the trees, grows tall.”