Seescapes: The World at My Feet: James Van Patten - Solo Show

18 February - 18 March 2025
Overview

For more than 40 years most of James Van Patten's work has dealt with landscape imagery.

 

When Van Patten started his career, he was drawing and painting the sky and the clouds. His following series were based on depictions of water and its reflection. And his most recent series is of reflections on sidewalks. These three different series reflect an analogy of the artist growing older.

 

When he was a young man, he had ‘his head in the clouds’. When he was middle-aged, he tried to notice constantly where he was and what moments of perception could look like in a painting, resulting on paintings reproducing the horizon at his eye level.

 

James Van Patten is now 85 years old, and as he grew older his body has become ‘stopped and bent’ and looking at the horizon sometimes hurts his neck. The artist describes that he is constantly looking down and being careful with his footing and this has shown him the world in a different way: less scenic and often gritty, but not ugly.

 

The artist titled the new series ‘Seescapes’ as he is now seeing things in the world that he didn’t see before. These eight new works will be featured in his solo show as well as some of his older work, so we can see how his career has progressed across 4 decades.

Works