website: www.patriciakaufman.com   email: firewords@aol.com

                  

Artist's Statement   My friend and oft times Curator Steven Butz has said that “the work comprising PK’s career has retained a constancy of intent that,  for all its’ diversity,  leaves no doubt about the concerns she has felt compelled to examine and explore.” Sounds more elegant than I would have expressed, but I do agree with that. To me painting, as well as writing, is a miracle of the chasing and developing of ideas and images.   To transfer what’s in my head out onto the canvas or paper has always astonished and thrilled me. It’s like a ride on the wine dark sea in a boat with mylar sails. (Mylar to reflect the sun, moon, stars and wild waves.)   The human figure has always been the centerpiece of my  paintings. Most frequently the figures are in motion. They are leaping, striding, swimming, heading into the wind at the top of a hill, dancing, bowling, maneuvering a tightrope, stepping right out of their clothes, and always with a  lyrical defiance. Even in the works where my subjects are sitting or lounging, ostensibly in a pose caught by my camera, they won’t be sitting for long.   My style is loose, flowing and brushy, giving the work a sense that it was painted in one fluid, uninterrupted encounter with the canvas.  But that is seldom the case.  I frequently rework  the paintings many times. With a wide ranging palate of vivid saturated colors in full confrontation with each other,  I often use black outlining to celebrate the marriage of drawing and painting.   I like to use photographs. I find my interaction with a photograph gives me a knowledge of the interior world of the subject that often surprises me – I’ve discovered secrets  never expressed just by concentrating on the eyes, hands, and body language frozen in time.   In an earlier stage I used  Plexiglas in over-layering the sheets to complex compositional effect. On a subliminal level it reinforces my idea that both as individuals and families, we are a jumble of shifting, unsteady, complex and competing elements and relationships.   I use collage and text fairly often. I am a writer as well as a painter, after all. And I am a feminist. This isn’t very popular these days, but it ought to be. I am painting and writing, first and foremost, about liberation. My conviction is that liberation is not for my subjects alone, to be free to dance and be naked and “own” our  world, so to speak, but it is as much about liberating the perceptions of the viewer from stale, outdated notions of who we are, who we were and who we might be.   With the exception of my ongoing pictorial interest in Greek gods and goddesses, and familiar Christian myths (as best seen in my series of very small paintings of saints and Heroes) my focus remains more personal. My heroes are everyday, familiar, and in the way of humanity, wonderfully ridiculous in their demand for or unawareness of their essential dignity and power.  I hope I convey the playfulness, the humor, the joyousness and absurdity of “becoming” and “self-expression” while leaving the darker images of my soul in a local Laundromat. Risky? Well,  why not.     Pat Kaufman Scripps College/BA University of Michigan Instituto Allende, San Miguel Allende,  Mexico Art Students League NYC MA New York University, Tisch School of the Arts     Pat Kaufman, born in NYC, pioneered in Soho and now lives in Sarasota, Florida much of the year. She writes and paints with a comically irreverent scalpel. She celebrates the joy of freedom.  Her painting RUNNING BRIDES exhibited at the Judson Church March 2004 show was inspired by her (three) plays about women who meet and marry men on death row. Her canvases of children in  all colors, Goddess women, warrior men and musicians of both sexes reflect her passion for diversity. Her canvases have been shown in Martha's Vineyard, Savannah, Beaufort, Charlottesville,  Manhattan Theatre Source, Times Square Gallery, Wings Theatre Gallery, Cornelia Street Café NYC, the Biennale Internazionnale in Florence, The City Museum Osaka, Japan, and in Florida - The Art Center Manatee, Art Center Sarasota, and the Longboat Key Center for the Arts.