Spotlight: Patricia Oblack

In the first year after starting my blog in 2007, I had a regular feature where I spotlighted other artists that inspired me. It is fascinating for me to look back at my choices and to read what I wrote, as some of these artists that were new to me then have become good friends since. Many of the names will be familiar to you and some will likely not. If you like, you can read my original posts for the following eight artists: Bridgette Guerzon Mills, Judy Wilkenfeld, Janet Jones, CW Slade, Barbara Kleinhans, Scott Gordon, Erik Saak, and John Copeland.

I bring this older feature from my blog up today as there is now another artist that I want to spotlight in the same manner: Patricia Oblack. Patty's paintings speak to me. All of them. The colors and textures of her abstract work captures something so organic and elemental. 

In Patty's words:

"Early, in 1954, I picked up a pencil and sat in front of the TV with Jon Gnagy’s New Television Art Book and my stack of white envelopes, ready to learn to draw. I learned how to shade cones, cylinders, and cubes, while hearing about the principals of perspective. Jon believed that everyone has a time in their life when the Art Spirit is dominant, I suppose I was right on target and the seed was sown.

Crayons,  colored pencils, tracing paper and coloring books, gave way to pen and ink and I begged my mother to purchase art lessons from Art Instruction, Inc. in Minneapolis, Minn. around 1962. You know the one...with the draw the pirate contest. I won, I think everybody won, but my Mom paid the $500.00 and in a few weeks a huge box arrived, with an oak adjustable drawing table, (which I still own) pads of paper, pen tips, charcoal sticks, watercolors, brushes, a Deluxe Bear Brand compass, a wooden T square and my first palette knife, which continues to be my favorite tool. I finished every lesson and mailed off the homework to be critiqued, by H. Okins, my instructor. After the first year, I received a Certificate of Accomplishment, andwas urged to keep going. Another student of the school, was Charles M Schulz, I was in good company. From that humble beginning, I continued through my whole life, painting, and drawing, constantly moving forward, on my journey through art.

Through several successful art related businesses, I have painted on walls, furniture, pottery, fabric, wicker, and glass. A chest of drawers, based on a Neoclassical Commode from 1770 is in London, England and two chests recreating Charles Wysocki’s early American style are somewhere in France. I’ve painted realistic folded curtains on hardboard, Jack Russell dogs and race horses on terra cotta pottery, orchid botanicals in watercolor, and on clay tiles for table tops, pine boughs on truck cabs, kites, birds and clouds on ceilings, and also antique furniture, refinished with milk paint.

Today, my work is abstract on hardboard, continuing to be self-educated, I am ever as always moving forward. My work has been shown from coast to coast in many galleries and recently a painting was shipped to an office in Hong Kong, during the Olympics. 

Today and for the past 8 yrs., I have woven strings of color onto board with the same palette knife from childhood, creating surfaces of deconstructed relief, crumbling stucco, and contemporary fresco. My paintings have been highly influenced by Jackson Pollock, Anselm Kiefer, Joaquin Sorolla, Pierre Redoute, Tosha Tudor, Marjolein Bastin and Marcia Myers. In studying their work and other contemporary artists, I began what was to be the backbone of my current style with a surface I can’t walk away from."

I can't walk away from them either.