By Bella Erakko
For Patricia Kreps, the Alliance Art Gallery’s March guest artist, the desire to create art tugged at her throughout her life. She remembers the teachers who encouraged, the mother who bought her art supplies, her choice to be an art major in college. “I have always been a representational painter,” she admits, describing the effect a landscape has on her and how she paints to draw that quality out, working in oil.
But the driving force behind her art happened in Europe. Spending her junior college year in Strasburg, France, she immersed herself in French culture, art, and history. But it was a spring trip to the visually intoxicating tulip fields of Holland that catapulted her into an epiphany. “I think I had an aesthetic experience. The spirituality of that landscape sealed that for me. I wanted to record the feeling of that landscape.”
The softness of her oil-based palette and the visual flow that she captures draw the viewer into her vision of that felt beauty and spirituality that so moves her. We are invited into her sacred space. Later, traveling to Greece for a year with her husband, again she experienced the sacredness of sanctuaries, antiquities, and the land itself.
Intertwined through these years, as a Texas-raised child, she earned her BFA from the University of Texas, followed by an MA in art history.
Back in Texas after her sojourn in Greece, she found herself drawn to landscapes that evoked that same type of epiphany in her. Moving with her husband to Missouri, where she has resided for the past 30 years, she took up teaching at Truman, then Mizzou and Stephens College. Kreps also got her MFA at Mizzou. Driving back and forth endlessly along Route 63, she often stopped to photograph a scene, admitting, “I am obsessed with Missouri farmlands and meadows … and corn fields … and corn mazes.” Her snapshots capture the composition that attracts her. It becomes the starting point for the painting.
She tends to work in series: ponds, dead trees, flooded landscapes, North Carolina coastal marshes, corn mazes. Landscapes, to have the spiritual impact she experiences, often become large 4’x4’canvases. But even that can be limiting as land flows horizontally. So she sometimes works in panels: two, three, or even four 4’x4’ canvases juxtaposed.
From the day she encountered the vast vibrant tulip fields in Holland to the rolling hills of Missouri, her eye seeks—and captures—the sacredness of land.
An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 11 from 4 until 7:00. This event is free and open to the public.
