When Covid hit, I lost my job. I’d been teaching art, something I’d been doing after two long careers—one in astrology and the other in technology. I remember sitting at my desk, reading the news on my computer, and I thought, “Where to from here?”
I decided to commit to my own art. Something I’d avoided doing since I was in my 20’s. I’d collected art equipment along the way, paints and papers and mediums and … whatever caught my eye. I collected it to use someday. With that news, someday had arrived.
My Story
When I was growing up, art was everywhere. Hanging on walls. Leaning against them, waiting to be hung. Held by magnets to the refrigerator. A painting we called God the Father, painted by my dad when he was a teen, had a place of honor in the hallway. Original portraits of native Americans lined the library walls.
Art was valued. It was the air we breathed. It was in me. It was time to let it out.
To loosen up and knock the cobwebs away, I returned to another childhood passion to find my subject. The house I grew up in was an old Victorian farmhouse. It sat on an acre of land that survived in a city that grew up around it. It was filled with fruit and nut trees. There was a grove of bamboo that was our jungle, and a giant old eucalyptus tree reigned over our world.
What this home gave us was the space for a menagerie. Birds and snakes, lizards and turtles, dogs and cats, rabbits and chickens. Even a monkey. The animals weren’t just pets. They were our teachers. They taught us more than responsibility. They taught us about caring, about empathy, about putting another creature’s needs before our own. The showed us many ways of being.
Beyond the property was a river along the Western Flyway, home to all sorts of animals and a constant flow of birds. Mallards and crows, and kingfisher, and woodpeckers, cormorants and grebes. Mockingbirds marched on the shore like soldiers on parade.
That was there I find a special relationship to a heron. I would go to the river to walk, to meditate, to do yoga. When I did, a heron came and perched nearby. We met there for years, during a challenging time. When my life turned upside down, and my direction changed, the heron spoke to me. Just as those animals of my childhood were my teachers, the heron guided me through my life changes.
After nine years, I was called to go east. The train that took me there, went along the river. As it did, the heron flew alongside the train, so close I could nearly touch it. Then, as the train turned the river to turn eastward, the heron tilted its wings as if to say, safe travels.
As I searched for a subject to paint, those animals came to me. Teachers again.
When I painted the Rooster, it reminded me of a song my mother’s helper used to sing to us about the buckeyed chicken. I have to say, I fell in love with it. It spoke to me, and it felt like it wanted to be on a mug. So, I looked around to find a way to do that. When it arrived and I opened the box, PittaPat was born.
My Process
I don’t choose my subjects. They call to me. I start by learning about them. I want to know their biology, their environment, their life cycles. Their stories and myths. I collect pictures of them and meditate on them. Then they talk to me, and I begin to paint.
I think they are leading me through a time of great transition. Where the heron led me through a time of personal transition, my animals are my rudder through a time of global transition. They are pulling together my life experiences as an astrologer. This is the time that we knew would be an important time of transition for the world, especially for the United States. And they are weaving that together with my life experiences in technology, my understanding of Ai. Experiences that gave me the comfort with all the technical tools needed to share them with others.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I have enjoyed creating them. As you hold them, see them, and touch them, you feel their spirit and that spirit uplifts you and guides you through these times.
Pat
