PATRICIA UNDERWOOD: SIGNS & SYMBOLS
/PATRICIA UNDERWOOD: SIGNS & SYMBOLS
April 18 - June 10, 2023
Buchanan Partners Gallery @ Hylton Performing Arts Center, Manassas
About the Exhibition
Patricia Underwood, Elder (from TREES Series), Photo silk-screen, linocut, mm on wood veneer, 42”w x 42”h
Patricia Underwood: Signs & Symbols features a range of recent artworks from the mixed-media artist and printmaker’s oeuvre. Underwood’s art is defined by the subtle and sophisticated use of materials and abstract forms to evoke spiritual, linguistic, and natural phenomena. A main theme running through all of Underwood’s bodies of work has been the use of her own unique symbols that she developed early in her career. Starting with Japanese kanji, it built to include unique signs of music and movement, as well as symbols from ancient caves and rock carvings. Throughout her career, Underwood has incorporated and developed these symbols into distinct series of artworks with content and imagery that span ideas related to prehistoric signs of life, lullabies, the female body image and its representation, communication and conflict, and most recently trees and their relationship to humans and climate change.
About the Artist
Patricia Underwood has exhibited nationally and internationally, at venues including the Corcoran Museum and two solo shows in Warsaw, Poland in 2007. Her work is included in numerous private collections including the Artist's Book Collection of the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., and several other institutional collections. Underwood obtained her BFA from Miami University, Oxford, OH, and her MFA from Washington University, St Louis, MO. She has taught drawing, printmaking, visual foundations and color theory at several schools, including the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. Her studio/home is located in Castleton, VA. She is represented by Haley Fine Art, Sperryville, VA.
TREES
Artist Statement
Humans have evolved in the last 200,000 years (a mere blip in earth’s 4.5 billion years of existence) from co-inhabiting our earthly territory with all other life forms on a relatively even playing field to becoming the most aggressively invasive species bar none, in the history of the planet. We are, as Richard Powers author of ‘The Overstory’ puts it “cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.” Our unique intellect that distinguishes us from other creatures (generative computation, promiscuous combination of ideas, use of symbols and abstract thought) seems to have come with one important element missing – responsible self-regulation. Our sense of connectedness to the planet and its inhabitants has all but left us. What it has brought on is an insatiable hunger for more…..of everything, at the expense of life itself.
Trees on the other hand, co-inhabit territory in a very different way, taking and giving over to suit the collaborative needs of other life forms with which they live. Forests are collectives where no one individual’s needs are met without a direct connection to the wellbeing of the whole. Competition in a forest is one form of collaboration. This collaborative wisdom is something we humans might learn from and perhaps be saved by. Using my own photo images of ancient trees silk-screened onto wood veneers, with additional layers of drawing, painting and printing, I expose environmental crises experienced from the trees’ perspective and create intense, powerfully animated compositions. My personal visual language illustrates nature’s urgings, her spoken language increasingly gone unheard by the ears, minds and hearts of those who inhabit and dominate her. I visualize these pleadings, revealing their ancient wisdom and urgency.
RANCOR & DISCORD
Artist Statement:
Language and communication, both verbal and symbolic, have long intrigued me. So have music and color. They are all actually one and the same with their common ability to express something uniquely human.
Over the past thirty years I have created my own distinct visual calligraphy, a personal language of shapes and colors. My work has evolved using them to convey my artistic thoughts and ideas. Like Aboriginal dreamtime paintings, these symbols connote people, experiences, histories and events, and make spiritual and social statements in the process.
An outgrowth of the series “At the Table” in which I sought to represent the energy that takes place at a typical gathering of friends and family, “Rancor & Discord” is a reaction to the 2016 election cycle. It explores the rancorous and discordant nature into which civil discourse disintegrates. Words become imperious, overbearing shapes colliding rather than connecting, bombarding rather than bridging. Color laden shapes claw their way through and strike the senses harshly. Like too much cigarette smoke, they fill the conversational spaces to the point of asphyxiation.”
Techniques and materials include linocut, chine-colle, collage, Xerox transfer, acrylic and gouache on Arches paper.
AT THE TABLE
Artist Statement
“At the Table” deals with the inherent need for human connection and sustenance. I was asked to participate in a show entitled “At the Table” in its early stages that subsequently got renamed and refocused. The subject matter stuck with and intrigued me. I began to think of how deeply spiritual and primal this was, not only being fed physically but spiritually as well. And then thought about many of the religious/ethnic celebrations that centered on food. Then I thought of my growing up in the fifties/sixties/seventies and how different those gatherings looked compared to today’s meals/celebrations, yet held the same significance. I thought of how this carried through each time we gather and partake, on a daily basis.
This led me to envision a series of works depicting the basic elements of coming to the table to share food: seating the guests, serving the food, saying grace, partaking and dessert. As a printmaker who loves incorporating diverse materials into my art, I chose wood veneers as a base substrate on which to create (a nod to the table?). These are treated as huge tabletops, if you will, onto which elements of fabric are chine-colled as table runners, placemats, border prints or tablecloths themselves.
My personal visual calligraphic printed shapes dance over the veneer surfaces as either guests standing in a circle waiting to be seated, wait staff arms gracefully serving the food to already seated guests, notes of grace hanging in the air above the guests as the blessing is said, a group of boisterous participants feasting or a beckoning spread of elegant desserts. Materials include wood veneer, fabric, lino-cut, and mixed media.
AERIALS
Artist Statement
In my Aerial Landscape series, I create oil paintings on wood panels in a non-tradition way, employing oil sticks both as drawing tools and as ink for printmaking techniques. All works are 16”W x 20”H x 2”D .
Working from sixty-five photos taken on a flight from Santa Fe, NM to Denver, CO I paint abstracted versions, that reveal the places and things I saw in ways not visible from the ground.
My biggest influences as an artist are prehistoric cave paintings and Aboriginal Art. They are the essence of human expression, visceral marks that convey an experience or understanding. Whenever flying the friendly skies, so to speak, lift-off and touch-down always put me in an absolute state of awe. While I am thousands of feet in the air, the views are equally enthralling and I cannot help but see symbols where rivers, mountains, crop circles and roads appear. It is these symbols of the history of the earth itself that I record in this body of work.