Intersection 15: National Life Painting

Pat has studied drawing and painting in Montreal at the School of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, at McGill University, and at Concordia University School of Art. She has also studied at Toronto's Three Schools of Art and Toronto School of Art, and at the Haliburton School of the Arts. Pat is a member of the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, the Colborne Society of Artists, and the Pontiac Artists' Association in Quebec, and has held a position on the Arts Council of Northumberland since 2007. Pat's work has been accepted into numerous juried shows, and she has been offered several curated solo shows. She received an Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grant in 2010, and has won local, national, and international awards. Pat Stanley uses two distinctly different perspectives to render aspects of her ongoing theme: the uneasy coexistence of the built environment with the natural world. Her Intersection series presents familiar symbols of our urban culture - concrete structures in Toronto's landscape - transformed by future environmental impact into images in an album of an extinct civilization. The perspective is close-up and intimate, the structures vulnerable and tenuous, yet the viewer senses the presence of archetypal, monumental icons of a modern civilization in decline. Her most recent Crossroad series, begun in 2011, takes a giant step back - and up - from this intimate encounter, using vivid, aerial perspectives to further explore her ongoing theme. These high-altitude views of sprawling urbanscapes bring to mind Hubble telescope images of galaxies long-dead, but giving us the light - and life - of their past. Pat Stanley is a pictorial historian of the inevitable dominance of environmental transformation over man-made permanence. The paintings at once celebrate this triumph and hold in awe and reverence the concrete monuments of contemporary urban civilization.