Artist’s Statement
Hearts, horses, women, moons, abstract . . . all the same. I am painting the heart/heartbreak, joy/beauty/pain, personal/political in this life we live. Always wanting more and deeper.
About the Artist
In 1974, Pat Dennis began painting at the Hopper House, Nyack, NY, the birthplace and boyhood home of American realist painter, Edward Hopper. The house was not yet an art center, it was being renovated by friends. At the time, Pat was influenced as an artist's assistant to Sari Dienes, on “The Land”, an artist’s community in Stony Point, New York. Neighbor Robert Rauschenberg would drop in on Sari and Pat for lunch. On the weekends, John and Yoko would come up to Sari’s for earth moving sessions. Strong influences, especially for Pat who had just gotten her degree in mathematics.
Dennis subsequently moved to Taos, New Mexico, with her two children. She studied for one year at the Taos School of Fine Arts, until the school closed due to the death of its founder. Pat continued to paint and study in Taos. She developed a working relationship with Randy Lee White, a renowned Native American artist. The Taos community of the 1970’s left its mark on Dennis: the gorgeous light, high desert, incredible mountains and sky, and the spirit of O’Keeffe.
In 1979, Pat and her children returned to New York, where she became an active member of the The New York Feminist Art Institute, an international collective of 28 women artists exploring the relationship between art and mainstream culture. Upon its closing, Pat then joined The Actors Institute where she and three others founded the TAI Gallery on 19th Street in New York City. During this period, the artist also exhibited and sold works in Nyack, and Manhattan at the TIA Gallery, the Nelson Rockefeller Gallery, and Leger de Main Gallery at Lincoln Center.
The artist states, “Life on the planet is difficult, as is painting the “truth”, whatever that may be in the moment. The artist continues . . . at present, residing in Baltimore, Maryland.
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