Paintings with vivid hues featuring life on a remote Irish island and nearby Encinitas can be either truly engaging or cold and distant. Depending upon how connected she is to the subject, paintings by Patricia Patterson can be truly engaging when she succeeds in communicating vivid human warmth and the magic of the Irish coastal landscape in a career survey entitled Here and There, Back and Forth at California Center for the Arts Museum in Escondido.

Cóilín Smoking, Pat Reading, Mary Washing

Up © 1982 by Patricia Patterson.Collection

David and Felicia Mandelbaum.

Patterson has spent much time on the Irish island of Inishmore; and from viewing her paintings, is extremely fond of a group of the island inhabitants. Painting with matte casein paint from photographs taken while on the island, her work is at its best when she reveals the intimate relationships between and the actual personalities of her friends there. Other works appear more formal and detached, and these seem more coldly theoretical or become more like illustrations.

Installed in a facsimile of a Spartan Irish cottage the painting Cóilín Smoking, Pat Reading, Mary Washing Up (1982), features a kitchen table, spare but for a radio and some sandwich makings, sitting front and center like an empty stage set. Behind are two men in front of a cast iron stove, one reads the paper and the other looks out from the scene while smoking a pipe. In the background is a woman in another room holding a dish towel.

Patterson’s painting becomes an Edward Hopper-like work of isolated individuals but lacks Hopper’s dramatic pathos. The painting seems more akin to an image culled from a dry educational article lecturing on the glum lives of people prior to invention of television. Other paintings displayed in the faux Irish cottage have a detached, unfinished quality to them.

Another artwork entitled “Hard Hearted Barbara Allen” looks like it was appropriated from instructional aids from an out-of-date elementary school Jack & Jill reader. On a shelf in front of a painted panorama of a sparsely populated coastal inlet are four painted, cutout figures. On the right are three men wearing rubber wading boots. On the far left is a lone woman wearing an apron. The tableax has a matter of fact quality that creates a scholastic inference.

More engaging are Patterson’s landscapes with slightly surreal lighting or her portraits that have an emotional investment. A series of portraits with character are installed in a gallery with a bare blue kitchen table with chairs, a fireplace, and a wood stove. Missing a tooth and smiling, a man stares out while intimately touching his face is woman in the double portrait “Coilin and Patricia” 1987. The painting is more lovingly painted than many others and has more detail. Patterson has painted the work with the same affection shared by the couple to make the work vivid and alive with detail, color, and pattern.

Nan in the Kitchen © 1985 by Patricia

Patterson. Image courtesy the artist and

Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA.

Another more detailed painting is “Nan in the Kitchen,” 1985. On the left, a cacophony of bowls, cups, and plates fills a hutch. In the perfect off-center of the painting, a woman wearing a green and white headscarf and blue and red flowered apron stares out as she handles a dishtowel. To her left is a clothed table set for tea. The painting is awash with different textures. Its complex textural versus smooth surface is metered poetry, and the painting shares a casual but warm intimate moment that a viewer may enjoy as much as the artist appears to have enjoyed painting it.

Elsewhere, another touching painting is “Pat’s Grave,” 1990. Painted on a dark brown ground, an isolated grass filled plot with the base of a gravestone is festooned with colorful wreathes. The joyful color and brushwork of the wreathes complement the somber subject. While sober, the painting is not maudlin, and the Caravaggist darkness of the underpainting makes the hues used for the grass luminous.

The more detailed and emotion filled paintings by Patterson are enjoyable to view as are her landscapes, and there are enough of them in this solo exhibition to warrant the drive on the perenially under construction Interstate 15 freeway.