Patricia Watwood’s New Solo Show “Beauty and Terror” will be on view at Dacia Gallery in New York City from April 29 to May 17, 2019. This new body of figurative paintings explores the human cycles of struggle, striving and transformation, and the beauty and terror experienced along the way.

Patricia Watwood is a figurative painter based in Brooklyn, NY. Watwood is a leading figure in the contemporary figurative movement. Watwood's paintings explore transformative narratives and mythological archetypes.  Grounded in a classical training, her paintings show timeless stories from a contemporary viewpoint.  Her most common subject matter is the nude, particularly women, using the human form as metaphor and muse. Her work is in public and private collections, and has been exhibited at the Beijing World Art Museum, The Butler Museum, St. Louis University Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum of American Art, and the Forbes Galleries, among others. Her commissioned portraits hang in institutions such as St. Louis City Hall, Washington University, Kennedy School of Government and Harvard University. Watwood earned her MFA in figurative art with Honors from New York Academy of Art, and studied with Jacob Collins as a founding member of the Water Street Atelier. Her teachers include Martha Erlebacher, Steven Assael, Vincent Desiderio and Ted Seth Jacobs. In addition to her studio work, she also teaches and shares her knowledge.  She has produced instructional DVDs including “Creating Portraits from Life,” with Streamline Art Video, and is a featured art instructor with Craftsy.com. Watwood has been an adjunct professor of drawing at New York Academy of Art, has given lectures and workshops across the country, and is a featured art instructor with Craftsy.com.  She has written articles for American Artist, American Arts Quarterly, and Fine Art Connoisseur; and published in academic anthologies on criticism, like the TRAC Conference publication. Patricia Watwood was born in 1971, St. Louis, Missouri, she now lives and paints in Brooklyn, NY. 

This new body of figurative paintings explores the human cycles of struggle, striving and transformation, and the beauty and terror experienced along the way.  The new paintings have been created over a turbulent period of my life, and reflect in metaphor my own journey through trial, limitation, growth and recommitment.  It feels to me that the whole world is in the middle of a critical time of opportunity, anxiety and crisis-- writ large on a planetary level, and infinitely small in the affairs of the heart.   In my new paintings, prophets, caryatids, lonely heroes, fleshy humans, and sensual dreamers are all part of the cast of this drama where we strive to understand ourselves, transcend the known world, and call to create a new one--but sometimes crash in trying.   Skies and seas swirl with smoke and debris, signaling the fragility of the human souls within.  Beauty and terror herein evoke not a “Golden Age” but perhaps the end of the game.  

In this set of paintings, I played with the brushwork, level of detail, abstract geometries, and expressiveness of the handling.  My aim was to open up the metaphoric range and evoke the freedom of 20th century painting to complement my affinity for representational figuration.   

During this time, this poem by  Rainer Marie Rilke’s poem from The Book of Hours has been a touchstone:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

Then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear.

….

Flare up like a flame

And make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me