New Alliance Art Gallery member, watercolor artist Patricia Garey admits that her favorite medium “is very capricious. It insists on being the leading partner.” She calls it a dance with fluidity. “Sometimes, it just doesn’t work out. it’s a clash of wills.” Oh, but when it does …

For Patricia, the attraction began with childhood drawing. One Christmas, her parents gave her a set of paints. Attracted to a National Geographic photo of a woman holding flowers, she—entirely untutored or trained—painted the scene because she liked it. It hangs in her studio today. “Sometimes I cannot get a painting to come together. Then I remember, I was just 14 when I painted that lady and tell myself, I can do this. It’s inherent in me.

Having lived in wildly different locales: Bermuda, West Africa, Virginia mountains—all while growing up—she developed a keen sense of image. Realizing she may never return to some of these incredibly beautiful places because, after all, one day she’d be old, she took a visual snapshot to store it in memory. It might be walking through the alps in Austria, standing in iridescent tropical blue water with bread-eating fish swimming around her legs, or a stunning Missouri sunset—Patricia connected to the visual world to her memory bank, using the shutter-click of her soul to store the image.

But for twenty years, busy with other aspects of life, she put art aside. And there it resided, waiting. One day she decided to read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and following her guidance began to journal … in words. Soon doodles appeared, then charcoal, collages, and one day watercolors exploded onto the pages—and she was back. A couple of years ago, Patricia and her husband, Richard Garey, were driving down Main Street as snow softly enveloped the Cardiff hillside. Richard took a photo. She decided to mix ink and watercolor. She poured black ink onto the watercolor paper, roughly matching the dark portions of Richard’s photo. Spritzed ink formed winter trees with feathery branches. After it dried, she added watercolor: cars driving through the snow; lamplights illuminating the night, big fluffy flakes drifting down, snowy white stairs leading to the lighthouse illumined by the darkening sky. Coupling these two media became a new passion, a new exploration. Recently Patricia poured ink onto a canvas board, surrounded it in plastic wrap, and magically, a ship in a storm emerged reminding her of Columbus’s fragile barks. She added mast and rigging, and it is on display at the Gallery.

“I am really enjoying ink and watercolor,” Patricia Garey admits. “There’s still a lot to learn. It’s quixotic.” But Missouri skies are pulling her to large canvases and acrylics because, “the Midwest skies are just spectacular!” And if it’s a cloudy monochromatic winter day in Hannibal … she can flip through the images stored in her visual memory, images clicked and stored in her heart, and maybe just add ink and watercolor.

The Alliance Art Gallery’s Second Saturday continues in a new format—Open House—on Feb 13. Come visit the Gallery any time between 1 and 6:00 p.m. to see what’s new. Receive your usual ticket to win a piece of art by featured member artist, Patricia Garey. We do the drawing at 5:30 live in Facebook, immediately notifying the winner, and arrange for pick-up.