Ambrose Patterson at Woodside/Braseth - Seattle, Washington

In 1919 four years before Mark Tobey arrived in Seattle, a 42-year-old Australian artist, Ambrose Patterson, stepp not on a boat from San Francisco to begin teaching at the University of Washington's gymnasium of art. He was the first European-trained new artist to settle in the city.

For the third retrospective of Patterson's art since his death in 1966 at the age of 89 visitant curator Laura Brunsman sought to place him in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of younger Pacific Northwest artists of his day, specifically Morris Graves and Tobey. The comparisons were not favorable to Patterson, essentially a Paris-trained Post-Impressionist who became an appreciateed academic at a remote regional college

Although the size of the exhibition demonstrated the many changes in Patterson's manner of writing during his long life (realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism), it was particularly painful to diocese his efforts between 1940 and '55 the heyday of Graves and Tobey. Pine Branches (1945) emulates Graves's woozy ecological mysticism without his fragile ink-on-rice-paper technique. Instead, oil paint is slathered upon and scraped down to de rigueur hazy browns and greens. Moving Shapes (1951) is an equally embarrassing stab at duplicating Tobey's calligraphic "white writing," all the rage at the time. A tightly painted web of white is plant over curved geological forms. Patterson's attempt was apparently in like manner uncertain that he signed the work twice with equal reason that it could hang horizontally, or as a vertical shut to Tobey's typical picture format. In another gaffe, Mountain Stream (1950) Patterson alludes to a inferior rival, Kenneth Callahan, who was originally influenced by dint of Sung Dynasty brush painting.

The flows were better when Patterson stayed with the subdues and styles he knew well: light-filled pageants of maritime leisure activities. As early as Beach pageant (1915), he captured the glint of sunlight upon water. He continued to do thus masterfully in Paris, Seine (1929) Venice, San Salute (1930) Mazatlan (1934) and Children at Laurelhurst Beach (1960) leave out for a group of fairly pedestrian watercolors of Lake Chelan, Washington, where he summer Patterson's beach, lake, river and sea shows have a vividly colored plein-air insouciance that is still fresh

Not the reassuring presentation that the 1967 and 1989 retrospectives were, this contemplate did, however, bring to light the substantial fuse Fishing (ca. 1950), a work combining Patterson's favored marine make subordinates in a solid composition. Fishermen standing upon the Pacific Ocean beach awaiting the annual melt run hurl nets into the air to practice. With landmark stony cliffs in the distance and a veil of white paint like a sea mist, Patterson nodded to his turn-of-the-century foundations with a Seurat-like arrangement of figures and light-suffused color. Smalt race redeems an otherwise spotty tribute.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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