Patty HallerI AM AN ANALYST. I use imagery of forest plants which grow all around us in the Pacific Northwest. My goal is to create spatial botanical worlds.

I used to tell myself that I create order from the chaos of the leaves and branches I see in nature. But now I believe it’s my own limited perception that prevents me from seeing something beyond chaos. There is a natural order to the way the plants grow, their density reflecting the available light and nutrients, their tracery reflecting their best bet to thrive. Plants even communicate through root systems, affecting the age and species mix. This is all more interesting than what I envision if all I do is look and simplify a scene as all artists are taught to do.

I’ve decided instead of reducing the forest into something I can understand and paint, I’ll look for a few compelling simple forms and then build something very complex with my art processes. I hope my paintings will change with each year I gain a more scientific understanding of nature.

I love art history and enjoy seeing the impact of my studies on my work. But unexpectedly, my interest in statistics and data science helps me just as much to create the paintings. I treat the forest as a huge dataset I am free to analyze, summarize and reenter, creating systems of groupings that vary with each new panel.

This experimenting is endlessly fascinating to me. Every combination of ideas from seemingly separate bodies of knowledge is a great reason to make the next piece of art.

Statement from November 2020 solo show at Smith and Vallee Gallery

Hoh River Herbaceous Space, oil on panel, 40 x 40″. Sold.

I use imagery of Pacific NW forests to create spatial botanical worlds. These imagined landscapes explore scientific field analysis, art history and color theory. The forest is observable and measurable but being human in the forest is spiritual and unknowable. I love both conceptions.

Forest conditions create an internal logic for plants to grow. Stems weave and wander in a search for light, and over time they achieve their unique and graceful shapes. We walk in the woods and see the horizon through the airy spaces, but only the abstraction of leaves and branches in the layered vegetative space. It is this complexity and variety of seeing that I want to capture.

Like everyone else in 2020, I spent much of the year at home with family or working alone in the studio. I spent time reading how Northern Renaissance workshops constructed imagery on wood panels. I read writings of David Hockney and Frank Stella to help me nurture more interesting pictorial space. I made color charts to find full spectrum color palettes and natural pigments that gave me comfort.

Surprisingly, I thought back often to my 19-year old self, a quiet forestry student who noticed things about forest plants that still fascinate me today. I think subconsciously I pivoted from emphasizing the large dataset aspect of my forest paintings to creating harmonious gatherings of plant shapes in space, because togetherness is what I wanted then and now.