I am a contemporary figurative artist working in the classical tradition of oil painting. I use narrative structures like allegory and myth to explore meaning in our common experience, and create images to evoke our spiritual human presence and emotional connection through art. My work prioritizes aesthetic principles, technical rigor and craft, classical training, and balances perception with design. My paintings travel through worlds of mythology, allegory, and contemporary human life. They reflect my search for meaning, and fulfill my desire for spiritual connection with my subjects and viewers. Like other artistic forms, the art world has great diversity in genres, each rich in their own traditions and language. The style of my work is called Contemporary Classicism, and is connected to a current international flowering of realism. In New York, and across the US, in Florence, France, Spain, and Sweden there are strong realist schools in which artists receive traditional training in private ateliers and larger academies. Our paintings are grounded in the mastery of historic methodologies, including academic draftsmanship and oil painting techniques. Like classical music, the discipline has a long and rich pedagogy. Practitioners expect to train rigorously for a decade in order to prepare for our careers. This is the study I have embraced with others who champion figurative painting and the tradition of western oil painting. Tradition has nothing to do with the past. To follow a tradition is to embrace a manner of working in which the values and aspirations of the past are continuous with those of the future. I do not chase the past. I chase what artists in the past have also chased—a celebration of the human form, a passion for and humility before nature, a belief that metaphor and narrative can help us puzzle out the mysteries of our time here on earth, and a belief in the emotional power of the common visual... (http://www.patriciawatwood.com/about/) undefined

More on Google