Archived Exhibition
Patricia Tobacco Forrester | Observed and Invented
September 6 - October 6, 2007
Reception: Saturday, September 8, 2007, 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Artist Biography

Patricia Tobacco Forrester focuses on two specific aspects in her watercolor paintings:  First, the subject matter must suggest energy and life, whether in the musculature of a tree or the unfolding of light and color found in a rose or moving water.  Secondly, the watercolors in their capacity to puddle, reticulate, and explode in bursts of color must parallel the organic action found in nature.  "My concern, in the paintings," says Forrester "is to coax abstract energy toward the observed subject to create a work that is intuitive as well as studied and developed."

Forrester's watercolors of are both realistic and conceptual.  They begin on site in locales as diverse as Chile, Costa Rica, Brittany, upstate New York, California's Napa Valley, and her home in Washington, DC.  Working with no preliminary sketches or drawings, Forrester returns to the same scene, day after day, working different areas of a painting.  Often, unable to complete a work on a painting trip, she searches out compatible imagery near her home and revises her initial concept.

Patricia Tobacco Forrester received her Master of Fine Art from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.  Her work is in the perminant collections of the Achenbach Foundation, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, and the Oakland Museum of California.

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