In Patty Wickman’s mesmerizing paintings, scenes ripe with meaning
Patty Wickman, a professor in the UCLA Department of Art since 1985, investigates non-linear narrative and representation within a realist framework—exploring through her paintings the spiritual and transcendent mysteries rooted in the everyday. At UCLA, Wickman teaches graduate and undergraduate drawing and painting.
"Patty Wickman’s astonishing work at Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica calls to mind William Blake’s oft-quoted invitation to see a world in a grain of sand. In Wickman’s painting “First Bite,” one of Western culture’s essential narrative threads announces itself via a simple backyard snapshot. The epic resides in the everyday. This is Eden; this is home.
The painting shows a little boy standing on a garden paver, one hand holding a just-bitten apple, the other reaching across his body as if to cover his nakedness. One bite of the fruit and self-consciousness begins to supplant innocence. Vegetables grow in the raised beds beside the boy, and behind him stands an espaliered apple tree ripe with emblematic import. The trunk divides into an elegant trinity of stems, the central spine rising to sprout a perfectly symmetrical effusion of leaves, the ornamental turned transcendent, the garden gone divine.
Wickman, based in L.A., loads but never overloads her sense impressions with symbolism. She pays scrupulous attention to the edge and surface and gleam of every form, but still an ease and looseness invigorate the surface. More than accreting the details of a thing, she describes the experience of it, the wonder of it."— Leah Ollman, Oct. 1, 2019
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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