American Beauty - Signed & Numbered Giclee Print

's] colored pencil drawings ... 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. 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.