ABOUT IPPY PATTERSON

Ippy Patterson grew up in a copper mine in northern Chile and studied drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design and writing at Brown University. She collaborates with some of the most prestigious publishers in the country, and her drawings have won numerous awards. When asked to describe herself, she is authentically self-effacing: “Let’s just say: ‘Loves to draw’ or ‘Saved from gloom and doom by pencil and paper’.”

Patterson spent several years drawing for The New York Times, and has illustrated books on fossils, primates, cuisine, insects, cosmology, imaginary beasts and biology. For several years she traveled the United States drawing endangered plants in their native habitats. Her books include 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names, by Diana Wells, and My Weeds, by Sara Stein. She has received awards from many significant institutions, including the American Institute for Graphic Arts and the National Academy of Sciences. Patterson won the 2006 Garden Writers of America Gold Award for Best Illustrations.

In BIG: Figurative Drawings and Botanical Prints, viewers will witness Patterson’s astonishing versatility in a show of large-scaled work, including charcoals of male and female nudes, larger than life, and gorgeously detailed giclee prints over seven feet long of flowers and plants, glowing with color.

BIG: IPPY PATTERSON – ARTIST’S STATEMENT

There are two kinds of drawings in this show: men and women, rendered fluidly in the moment in charcoal, always from life, and giclee prints of pencil-and-water-color plant forms, also drawn from life but blown up to many times their natural size.

Drawing from life is an exhilarating process. Signals move from eye to brain to hand almost instantaneously, but it takes concentration, a relaxed intensity, a trance, really. When concentration slips, there is high chance that the lines won’t come together. I can always feel it when it’s working. I always hope to get at least one drawing from a session. Most get thrown away.

Producing the large botanical prints is something else entirely. It takes me hours to do a single drawing of this sort; they are careful constructions done to scale. My mood when doing this work is free of tension; the forms emerge gradually in increments. I think of this process as a kind of study. The object I’m rendering for hours, while seemingly stationary on my desk, is constantly responding to shifting daylight; a magnolia at 11 AM is not the same magnolia at 2:00 PM. An eraser then becomes as critical as pencil, pen, ink, and paint. I rework these drawings as I go, and hardly any are ever thrown away.

Now to the crucial step in this print-making collaboration, my brilliant fellow artist Roger Haile, who takes my botanical drawings, so small and quiet, and makes them huge and vibrant. Using his immense knowledge of contemporary artmaking techniques, a subset of his remarkable visual talents, he showed me one day what a few rosehips look like enlarged ten times. Roger’s work on these pieces is as labor intensive as my own as we seek the perfect expression of these pieces in this new large scale. I am indebted to him for the beauty and power he has brought to the original drawings.