| Patricia Tobacco Forrester | ||
| Birth Date: September 17, 1940 |
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| Death Date: March 16, 2011 Artist Gallery |
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| Patricia Tobacco Forrester was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. She grew up in nearby Hatfield. When her grandfather arrived at Ellis Island, the clerk changed his last name from Tobczynski to Tobacco.
Forrester became an art student under Leonard Basking at Smith College. In 1963 she received her bachelor of fine arts from Yale and in 1965 she received her master of fine arts from Yale. She studied with Chuck Close and Janet Fish, and spent much of her youth tending to the asparagus, cucumbers and tobacco on her family’s Massachusetts farm. With an imbued appreciation for plant life, she once said her goal as a n artist was to capture nature’s vitality on paper. Forrester moved to the Washington D.C. area in the early 80s and frequently painted landscapes around the District, including at the National Arboretum.
She painted from life. “No preliminary drawings, no photographs are ever involved”, she writes. “I sit on the ground using a cardboard box to lift my paper and tilt it slightly toward me”. In other words, Forrester is a “plein air” painter who worked directly in nature rather than in her studio.
Yet, while her luxuriant watercolor paintings are a direct response to nature, they are not slavish imitations of nature. “The subject of my work is always growth, how trees and plants bulge and stretch and open”. Brilliantly colored flowering forms are larger than life are arrayed in their natural habitat against contorted tree forms and undergrowth. “By bleeding color into color I hope to make an analogy with how natural forces affect each other”.
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