Q&A with Patricia Schappler @patriciaschappler #womenartists #figurativepainting #narrativeart
“Working with the human form, I seek to uncover memory, myth, and relationship, understand how we transform through experience, and embody the sensual and the sacred.
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Patricia Schappler is a figurative draftsman and painter, born in Nashua, New Hampshire as one of eleven siblings. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts including the Elizabeth Jones Scholarship for Drawing, at the University of New Hampshire. There, she worked with Sigmund Abeles, Carol Aronson-Shore and Scott Schnepf. Schappler earned her Masters of Fine Arts at Brooklyn College including the Charles G. Shaw Award for Painting, working with Philip Pearlstein, Lennart Anderson, Lee Bontecou and Sam Gelber. She now resides in Bedford, NH with her husband and family of four in an 1899 farmhouse they are restoring. She has taught figure drawing and painting for many years at various institutes including Montserrat College of Art, Rivier University, New Hampshire Institute of Art, and the Institute of Art and Design at NEC. Schappler is included in many private collections along with Southern New Hampshire University and Winchester Hospital collections. She shows regionally and nationally, and has earned over sixty drawing and painting awards including the Certificate of Excellence from the Portrait Society of America, the Bill Creevy Award for Pastel from the Pastel Society of America, the Georgopolous, Joan Dunfey, Prescott, and Lassonde Awards for Drawing and Painting in NH, Works on Paper National, Cambridge National, and the Matter Communications Awards from Boston, MA. Her work may be found in magazines and journals including Manifest INDA, INPA Journals, Artists Magazine, the Boston Voyager, Strokes of Genius, NH Magazine, and Studio Visit.
Q&A
What concept or narrative is behind your work?
I’ve always recognized the drama and power of Baroque art, finding the energy and passion of these visual stories, spiritual. Using the bible, myth, art history, and fairytale to enter my paintings, most of my imagery has centered on the human figure. It is here within the process of painting, that a mark that exists, is later, gone; wiped out, only to be reborn in another mark that is its echo. I find clarity in this making and taking away. As someone who grew up Christian and of European descent, my upbringing has suggested that light parallels order, and darkness, chaos. I can often feel my own questions of faith, partnership, and the balance of opposites churning within my work, for the ideas of light and dark attach in my mind. I cannot find or resolve the meaning of one without the other. I imagine a meeting place in Labrynth.
Do you ever venture out of your creative process to try new things?
I move around a lot inside materials and subject with my thoughts on the abstract positioning of shapes, textures and value within space. I am intuitive with materials. I tighten, tighten, tighten my seeing skills when observing, before relaxing in the face of something I can’t and don’t want to control completely. Materials vary from dry drawing tools including charcoal, graphite, and pastel, to mixed materials including collage, shellac, acrylic and oil. I don’t want to be comfortable, but curious, pushing scale and materials alertly and sensually. So if my process is generally to work a few ideas into either a sketched or photographed format as a beginning possibility, followed by choosing a scale and material that meets that idea, (often times large scale oil paintings on board;) I will also work quite small on paper and canvas to resist habit and cultivate thoughtfulness about the why of my choices. I never completely plan a painting, it evolves, and I learn from it. I am essentially quiet, focused on family and home. Travel is less comfortable to me but significant for how I understand human environment, and this broader feeling for the meaning of ‘home’.
Who’s your art crush and why?
I think I have many art crushes and they’re not all alive or in this century, but off the top: Anselm Kiefer’s textural intensity, the sensuality of Michael Grimaldi’s shadowed figures, the fierce rage, friendship and love of life as seen through the eyes of Paula Rego and Louise Bourgeois, the critical grace of Kara Walker’s cut papers, later Vincent Desiderio imagery with his massive evocative greys, the gentleness felt through Antonio Lopez Garcia’s eyes, Rembrandt’s solidity of form, and subtlety of expression, the lethal punch of Joan Didion’s verse , Leonard Cohen’s haunting lyrics, and Faulkner’s unswerving understanding of viewpoint and loss.
Explain your process.
I work through drawing and painting problems in the image rather than prepping small complex mock-ups. Loose preliminary sketches may occur but frequently on the actual piece. I take quite a few photos of the figures I will be drawing or painting from, working with a combination of observation from life, photos taken, invention, and memory. Most of my work is set under multiple light sources, with tipped, compressed planes, shallow spaces, and contrasts of value and color. Pattern is significant to mood and sense of place. I make many wrong turns that right themselves in the process of responding to what I feel and see. I don’t know what’s needed until I’ve taken away and added in, working intuitively so that gesture and body language become over time, particular. Beginnings are often literary in thought, coming from something I’ve read, heard, or dreamt, and merging with other explorations. Materials that are forgiving, that change over time, that provide for transparency and opacity, and allow for both immediacy and patience, appeal to me. I want to still a churning world, slowing time enough to understand through my senses.
What’s hanging above your sofa?
A window and frequently our cats: Hoku and Sai, but above our rockers are a series of eight framed, abstract and figurative prints including intaglio, lithographic, screen, and photo-transferred images by my colleagues and myself as a scholarship portfolio for students at the Institute that we also shared with each other. They hang above the plant covered mantel with a sculpted bunny to the right and a garden through the windowed door.
Labrynth, 2020 | Oil on canvas | 60 1/4 × 48 in
