Second Place Award of Excellence
The San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild
2024 Spring Online Exhibition
An International Juried Online Exhibition
March 25, 2024 – May 25, 2024
JUROR:
Nancy Lim, Associate Curator
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Department of Painting & Sculpture
Congratulations to our
Second Place Award of Excellence Winner
Patti Arbino
Patti was awarded the second place for her 14x11” Soft Pastel
Masquerade
About Patti:
My goal as an artist is to capture the essence of a subject, and to preserve that image in a painting. I started drawing at a very young age and have always been influenced by nature and wildlife. As a child, my first artwork consisted of pencil drawings of our pets and assorted objects around our home. This then led to charcoal drawings of wildlife in my teenage years, to experimenting with the soft pastel medium in junior college. I have also worked in oil, acrylic, and watercolor, but the soft pastel medium won my heart. My art education includes a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art from California State University Northridge and an Associate of Science degree in Commercial Art from Cuyamaca College in Rancho San Diego. One of my favorite pastimes is walking along the beaches in California, especially after high tide. The vibrant colors of seaside rocks create lovely displays. For me as an artist, nature is the greatest inspiration.
What I like about soft pastel paintings is that they are hand-painted works of fine art. For example, I like to use my fingers to apply and blend the pastel directly on to the board because I want to feel the pastel as I move it around on the surface. I enjoy creating unique ways to express the visual beauty within nature by pulling out various shapes and illuminating them with the pure, bright hues of pastel. Additionally, I will focus on the organic shapes and lines created within rocks when designing a composition. I am inspired by the synchronicity between extreme close ups of rocks (especially jaspers and petrified wood) and arial views of painted deserts, mountains and riverbeds.
To start, I take several photos of an object, and then work out compositions until I come up with one that displays what I want the subject to convey. Since photos tend to darken values, I refer to my actual rocks or rock slabs in natural light while painting.
I first draw the composition onto the board, and then start applying the pastel. For the initial layers of my paintings, I use medium textured pastels, as well as hard pastels to set in lines and sharp edges. After working on a few layers, I then use a buttery soft pastel on top for intense highlights and more vibrant colors. The only tool I use is a kneaded eraser molding it with my hand to create a fine tip or a wide flat edge to push the pastel color up against another color without overlapping or blending. To create texture, such as tiny sand pebbles or rough textures on the surface of a rock, I often will use a splatter technique (soft pastel, rubbing alcohol, and a toothbrush). After the splatter technique dries on the board, I will dot in shadows next to the droplets depending on the light source and then I will use the tip of a kneaded eraser to blend the pebble to the accompanying shadow.
The final piece is what I want others to see – to experience the beauty of what nature created naturally.
About Masquerade:
Masquerade is based on a close-up of a cut slab of Morrisonite Jasper. Morrisonite Jasper is a type of chalcedony, which is a microcrystalline form of quartz. This unique jasper is renowned for its unusual patterns, vivid colors, and beautiful designs. The title of this piece reflects the blueish area in the upper right of the painting, which looked to me like a mask. The brands of soft pastels I used were Unison, Jack Richeson Handrolled, Sennelier, and Schmincke. For the detail work, I used Holbein and Faber-Castell Polychromos pastels.
Important Exhibitions:
Wood to Rock II, a piece in a series of petrified wood soft pastel paintings, was shown during the Hilbert Museum of California Art Voices in Pastel: Pastel Society of the West Coast Honoree Exhibit in 2022. W. Truman Hosner, Museum Liaison for the Pastel Society of the West Coast, along with Jean Stern, Director Emeritus of the Irvine Museum of California Art, curated 41 paintings (including Wood to Rock II) from the 2022 Pastel Society of the West Coast’s Pastels USA: 99 Voices in Pastel show which was at the Art Center Morro Bay.
Wood to Rock III, another piece in a series of petrified wood soft pastel paintings, was a Third Place Award winner and sold during the 2023 Pastel Society of Colorado's 19th Annual Mile High International Pastel Exhibition. This painting also won two additional awards: an Award of Merit during the 2022 Pastel Society of the Southwest's National Juried Exhibition, and an Honorable Mention Award in the Abstract Category of the 24th Annual Pastel 100 Competition for the Pastel Journal Magazine.
Voices, a painting of seaside rocks, was shown and sold during the 2023 Pastel Society of Colorado's 19th Annual Mile High International Pastel Exhibition. The artwork was used for parts of the show’s advertisement flyers.
My paintings have also been exhibited during juried exhibitions at various galleries and museums out of state, including the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico,
the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg, Oregon, the Priscilla Fowler Fine Art Gallery in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Elaine Felder Gallery in New Braunfels, Texas.
For a more detailed list of venues, please visit my website at www.PattiArbinoFineArt.com.