PATRICIA WELLBORN’S EXPERIMENTAL LANDSCAPES ARE A WINNER

The mountains of Western North Carolina have been home to Patricia Wellborn for twenty years now. They provide a constant source of peace, strength and inspiration to this Henderson County artist. But she paints her landscapes not only from her local experience. In 2006, she studied with Steve Almone on Monhegan Island, Maine and painted New England scenes. Every year she visits New Mexico, and reports “I find the sharp contrast between the clear, stark beauty of the Southwest and the soft hazy colors of the Blue Ridge very exciting.”

Although she claims that it is a challenge to represent on paper the varying illuminations of different regions, the resulting body of work demonstrates that she has the eye to do so. Consider three recent juried exhibitions in our area.

• In 2007, at the 62nd Juried Exhibition of the Watercolor Society of North Carolina, her “Runoff” won the St. Cuthbert’s Mill Award. The work showed an understanding of Southwestern light, dry and stark.
• In 2008, when the Western Carolina Branch of the League of American Pen Women asked me to judge their exhibit of member’s visual art, my first choice was her “Surf at Monhegan,” a work so evocative of the Maine coast that I swore I could hear the crashing water.
• Also in 2008, the Friends of Carl Sandburg at Connemara joined Hendersonville’s Wickwire Gallery in sponsoring “Connemara Visions” judged by William Jameson of Charleston, South Carolina and Saluda, North Carolina. His “Best of Show” award went to Wellborn for “Shed at Connemara,” an eye-catching depiction of light and shadow that was unquestionably representative of the Southern Appalachian region.

Wellborn majored in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and continued her

studies with Carrie Burns Brown, Patricia Cole-Ferullo and Harry Thompson. Her first solo exhibit was in 1994. She won “Best of Show” at the Transylvania County Art League in 1993 and 1996, and at the Art League of Henderson County in 2000. The North Carolina Arts Council gave her a Regional Artist Grant in 1998 for a painting trip to a Benedictine Abbey (the Christ in the Desert Monastery) near Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Between 2000 and 2005, she sold real estate and did very little painting. Then she kicked over the traces and spent the summer painting in New Mexico. When she returned to North Carolina, she once again painted landscapes full-time. In 2006, First Congregational Church in Hendersonville provided an opportunity for us to see landscapes created during the first ten months after she returned to full-time painting.

Some of her best work qualifies as mixed media since she often adds acrylic accents and sometimes combines other elements such as handmade paper or “found” paper. “I like the play of transparent watercolor against the opaque acrylic,” she says. Occasionally, one sees the influence of Pat Cole-Ferullo in the underlying esthetic, the drive to extract the heart of an outdoor scene and represent it semi-abstractly. But the technique and the specific details of the vision are distinctly Pat Wellborn.

Over the past seven years, my newspaper columns commented favorably on many of her paintings. In 2002, I reported that Patricia Wellborn’s Forest Floor “is a lovely representation of ferns, where the power of acrylics is used to accent the watercolor painting with pleasing bright color highlights. She uses acrylics judiciously to good effect, often in conjunction with other paints. Her Rapids shows a good eye for the appearance of rocks as water flows over them apace.”

I commented in 2006, “a group of

collage or mixed media paintings entitled Petroglyph Series incorporates numerous icons such as the mischievous flute player Kokopelli painted in acrylic. I liked especially Petroglyph Cliff and the collage entitled New Mexico Doorways.” About her 1998 paintings near Abiquiu, NM (Georgia O’Keefe’s winter home), I reported Wellborn was musing that people err in thinking that O’Keefe invented bizarre colors. “She painted what she saw,” Wellborn said, and in that tradition her colors from New Mexico are also sun-drenched and gaudy.

Patricia Wellborn primarily paints in her studio, working from sketches and color studies done on location. The underlying theme of all her paintings, as well as her major source of inspiration, is her love of nature. She exhibits at the Asheville Gallery of Art at 16 College St. in Asheville, North Carolina and at the Conn-Artist Gallery at 611 Greenville Highway in Hendersonville.

© 2009 Edward C. McIrvine

Arts Spectrum column #425 
March 27, 2009