Motifs of Flora and Fauna: Painting by Pat Sollows
A Mid-Winter's Night Dream, oil on canvas
Pat Sollows is a Nova Scotia artist who creates oil paintings using motifs of flora and fauna. Many of Pat’s recent paintings combine animals and humans, depicting human figures with the heads of animals, for example.
I enjoy the color scheme that Pat tends toward in her work. While her works are often saturated in dark shades of black and blue, it’s the fiery reds and lush green hues that create polish and visual interest. Pat’s painting style is fairly loose and gestural, and combined with these bizarre figures lends each painting a dream-like quality.
Other works are more abstract, with dark, muddled backgrounds that blend into unidentifiable figures. In these cases, Pat’s titles become more pertinent, often giving the viewer additional information and a jumping-off point into the work. The deep reds and blacks give these paintings almost a corroded aesthetic, and they remind me of the work of artists like Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud.
