Pat Stanley Matthews
Bio
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1931, raised during the depression, Pearl Harbor and the 2nd world war. At age 15 I began attending Principia, a boarding school in St. Louis Missouri, following those 3 high school years with William Woods Junior College in fulton, Missouri. My consuming interest then was dance which I pursued for two summers at Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts and then New York in the fall of 1951. By the next spring 1952 I had begun a career on the Broadway stage first as a dancer and eventually as a dancer/singer/actress. I worked for a decade and then left the business for family life. After a few years I took up painting, studied with Sam Feinstein in New York and Cape Cod, Massachussetts. Since then my present husband Gerry Matthews, who was also in the theatre, and I have gone through various permutations of creativity including making rustic furniture for the northwest and New York market. Now Gerry presents his surreal sculptures at his Black Door Gallery and Museum of Un - natural History while I paint and write poems. |
"Sylvan Beach, Miky Way Galaxy"
4' x 4', acrylic on canvas
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"Dutchess County, Planet Earth"
21" x 17", acrylic on paper
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Statement
The most exciting thing in art is what happens in the process of creating. Anything. A poem, a song, a painting. It is being in touch with something from beyond your conscious self - the energy with which all things are created perhaps. The experience of flowing with that energy in a kind of dialogue is quite breathtaking and, frankly, feels sacred. But I think this state will be recognized by anyone who struggles toward a solution. The mathematician getting stuck, grappling with an obstacle determined to push past it suddenly falls into the blissful byplay of resolution. Indeed even revelation. Beautiful. To be an artist is to live unselfconsciously; to plunge into the world of feeling and to swim there following the currents of imagination and intuition. Creative life is not restricted to poets, painters and musicians. Living creatively is possible for everyone. To engage with care, with attention, truth and passion; to lose yourself in what you do and do what you do wholly is the way of the artist.
Increasingly over the last few years I have been struck by our daily lives counterposed against the backdrop of the cosmos. I noticed what appealed to me in certain of my past paintings was this intimate cosmic interface. I reworked four of these pieces and began playing with the notions of space/time and parallel/alternate/multidimensional universes. These paintings certainly do not constitue scientific propositions and are not distilled ideas but are fragments of a whole much beyond me. Just intuited imaginings metaphysical in impulse and surreal in expression. I wonder about how these theories impact our experienced lives. Are these spheres of being to be found within ourselves? How do they reverberate externally? Does our free will translate as quantum observer? |
"Safe as Houses"
21 1/2" x 18 1/2", acrylic on canvas |
"Now and Now and Now and Now"
11" x 14", acrylic on canvas panel |
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"Passages"
2' x 3', acrylic on canvas
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The world
Through which we travel
In which we walk
The world
In which we eat
Sleep, drink
Exult, worry
Tell our stories
Whose windows
We gaze out
This world
In which we
Love,long
Sorrow, laugh
Transforms entirely
Each moment
We make a choice
As though
Every decision
Were a step into
An alternate universe
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Contact
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Events
Clyde and Mary Harris Gallery
at Walla Walla University
3rd Street and College Ave
College Place, WA
527-2600
January 8 - 30, 2008 |
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