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Pat Walker Pat Walker is recognized as a gifted contemporary Southern painters. Her highly representational portraits, still-lifes and landscapes are masterful exercises of chiaroscuro, the manipulation of light and dark. Pat, born at home in Tippah County, grew up in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, a small Delta farming community. Her father, Martin Walker was a farmer. Her mother, Lola Wiggs Walker, who introduced her to art, was also a poet of some renown. From an early age, Pat was aware of the style of painting that “took her breath away“ even if she could not put a name to it until much later. After years of painting, studying with instructors who were also mentors, Pat has honed her talent from which her particular “language of art” has emerged.

The contrast of light and its absence, evocative of Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro, is the defining component of her style. By means of it she aims “to create mystery and emotion.” These two elements are the real subjects of her work. Her classic representations of fruit, jug, table and cloth are windows opening to domestic worlds. The views evoke tales of life in imagined homes and times. Her representation of the human face is a view to the inner world of the subject’s personality; the unarticulated life-quest, heroic, tragic, wise, at-risk, on the cusp of accepting inevitable challenges and the resigned contentment of latter years. Her faces cannot be forgotten. They linger teasing from the viewer’s mind the story that explains; or searching for a name that has the power to keep safe what the viewer experienced.

Workshops/Classes

Pat currently teaches workshops in Rolling Fork, MS. and weekly classes at the Vicksburg Culture Center (http://patwalker-workshops.com)

Awards

Eastern Regional Show with Oil Painters of America Richeson75/Still Life for 2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation (New York); Mississippi Arts Commission (Jackson, MS); The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (New York); Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans). She was also honored to be a blue-ribbon winner for PBS.

Her work is held in private and corporate collections throughout the USA and Canada.