The Language of Her Art

Patty Tacquard of St. John paints in oil on canvas.  She investigates how the brilliant play of color, light, and shadows make the human figure three-dimensional and explores the vignettes behind everyday life.An avid swimmer since childhood, Tacquard explores a fascination with the way water changes forms and colors while light reflects and mirrors from below. She notes that "it is always a challenge to capture the ever-changing motion and light that water creates". She adds a deftly painted surfer, swimmer, or sun bather to the seascapes for shadow emphasis and to create a story line a tantalizing twist, Tacquard works in the studio creating images of tattooed bodies. Eliminating extraneous details, the crystalline clarity of each individual  tattoos become the poetry of these striking portraits.

  Tacquard continues to develop paintings built around water, from the open sea and from contained still lifes.  Her use of light and shadow gives each of her paintings a lively visual recording.  Her compositions of swimmers and surfers or flowers in a clear vase of water nab the viewers attention, like the first line of a short story that reels in the reader.