i am a maker, seeking to grow through a creative process that involves words, paint, clay, photographs and shared tables. thank you for being a part of this journey.
As a multi-disciplinary artist, Patton uses found family photos and memory to create work that explores personal narratives primarily through the use of color and form manipulation.
She employs several pallets ranging from high chromatic colors to low intensity tinted hues. Patton uses color as a way to express the emotion that comes with experience. With various mediums, she creates work that appears to be suspended in a dream like state with broken brush marks and pockets that reveal an unresolved underpainting underneath the surface.
“As a child growing up in a single parent household, nuclear family units were deeply intriguing to me. I have very few photographs of my childhood and only one with both of my parents. Due to this lack of documentation and a fascination with families, I was drawn to the dollar bin vintage photos at every antique mall I visited.
I began collecting these photos because I was initially drawn to the colors and compositions within these images. At the beginning of my Junior Year at the Kansas City Art Institute I began painting from childhood photos and more recent photos I had taken in the prior year. When I was using photographs from my own childhood I found it difficult to allow the painting to simply be a painting. I was fighting with my own memories too much to find freedom in the process.
In the last year of my BFA at the KCAI, I started bringing these photos into my studio and using them as source material for my Senior Thesis. When I began painting from found photos I found more freedom to deviate away from the original images. Found photos have given me an opportunity to explore the elements of play and curiosity at a greater level.”
