Through the Looking Glass: The Colored Pencil Drawings of Elizabeth Patterson

THE COLORED PENCIL DRAWINGS OF

E L I Z A B E T H PATTERSON

THE COLORED PENCIL DRAWINGS OF

E L I Z A B E T H PATTERSON

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Soon after completing the novel, Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carrol began writing the sequel, Through the Looking Glass. Based again on his heroine, Alice Liddell, Carrol conceived of yet another enchanting universe of adventure and adversity for Alice, who must find her way alone through a world which defies conventional logic and reason. The fantastical characters and events she confronts are born from a combination of memories of her orderly waking world, and the swirling illogical artistry of her dreams. With one foot in each sphere, order and disorder are at constant odds, and the resulting balance is a spectacular and wondrous tale of how concrete notions can transform into abstraction.

While Carrol brilliantly explored these ideas through literature, Elizabeth Patterson has illuminated this theme through her colored pencil drawings of rain on the windshields of moving cars, which are at once meticulously hyperrealistic and complex abstractions. Though she had always been drawn to water in her work, the subject of the windshield allowed for the exploration of multiple realities in her images. David Pagel, in the Los Angeles Times, described this duality as, “a felicitous combination that echoes the double nature of her images, which let you look at and through the surface — into a multilayered world where otherwise ordinary details are suffused with extraordinary beauty.”

Extraordinary for their technical finesse, and utterly beautiful, Patterson’s drawings are renowned for transforming the mundane simplicity of commuting in the rain into brilliant displays of the combined effects of water and light. “All of a sudden I started looking at the patterns on the windshield and at the very diffused background out the window. It blew me away. You have this shifting, changing canvas, and then the wipers go across and change it all. I was beside myself with this imagery,” she says. Patterson completed her first “rainscape” in 2006, and for the fourteen years since, she has continued to create new versions of the intertwined worlds of the real and the unreal. With each individual raindrop that she renders by hand, her drawings are the preservation of the briefest moment in time, and how that single frozen instant can embody the most marvelous complexities and the most pure simplicities in one.

While Alice tries to apply the familiar rules of chess to the peculiar new world in which she finds herself, she eventually must give in to the disorder to understand all that she has encountered and finally become Queen. Similarly, Elizabeth Patterson embraces the familiarity of her subject matter, yet pushes us to succumb to the chaos in order to see the true allure of her work, as we travel with her from one side of the windshield through the looking glass.

— CK Contemporary

Elizabeth Patterson, Presidio III, Colored pencil on illustration board, 20 x 22 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Glen Park, 6 pm, Colored pencil, solvent and pastel on illustration board, 12 x 12 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Presidio II, Colored pencil on illustration board, 18 x 20 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Emerald Highway, Colored pencil on illustration board, 18 x 24 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Carwash II, Colored pencil on illustration board, 18 x 24 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Carwash III, Colored pencil on illustration board, 16 x 16 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Presidio IV, Colored pencil on illustration board, 16 x 26 in

Elizabeth Patterson, The Presidio, Colored pencil and pastel on Strathmore mixed media board, 18 x 25 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Red Car, Colored pencil on illustration board, 12 x 22 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Eiffel Tower IV, Color pencil and solvent on Strathmore Bristol vellum, 10 x 18 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Stagecoach Road, 2pm, Colored pencil on illustration board, 12 x 14 in

Elizabeth Patterson, River I, Colored pencil, pastel and india ink on Strathmore illustration board, 12 x 18 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Riverside Drive, Burbank, Colored pencil, graphite and pastel on illustration board, 12 x 18 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Beverly Glen Boulevard V, Graphite and colored pencil, 16 x 24 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Century City, 3 pm, Colored pencil, solvent and pastel on illustration board, 12 x 26 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Coldwater Canyon Boulevard II, Graphite, colored pencil and solvent on Strathmore Bristol vellum, 15 x 30 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Magazine Street III, New Orleans, Colored pencil, solvent and pastel on illustration board, 18 x 36 in

Elizabeth Patterson, Dusk, Avenue des Champs-ĂˆlysŃ?es II, Colored pencil, solvent and pastel on illustration board, 22 x 24 in

Elizabeth Patterson, La Conciergerie, Colored pencil and solvent on Strathmore illustration board, 16 x 22 in

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