PAT HAVIS

My Dog (oil on hardboard) 37 x 54 cm

Pat Havis was born in Epping in 1949. Following a Foundation course at Harlow Technical College she studied for a B.A. in Fine Art at Nottingham School of Art (now Trent University) from 1968 to 1971.

A one year postgraduate course at Brighton Polytechnic led to a teaching career which lasted over thirty years. After a year teaching in Slough she moved to Macclesfield in 1973 and has lived in and around the Cheshire town ever since, working as Head of Art at a variety of schools in the area. In the nineties she was awarded an M.A. in Art Education from Manchester Metropolitan University. She retired from teaching in 2008.

On moving to Macclesfield Pat enrolled in life drawing classes at the local college to help re-boot an artistic production somewhat stalled by her new and extremely demanding teaching career. It worked. Whilst the demands of teaching never diminished – and over the years invariably increased – Pat continued to paint every day.

A rider since childhood, and in adult life the owner of horses, equine paintings have regularly been produced and there have also been a number of conventional (and some less conventional) landscapes.  Flowers, however, remain her primary interest. Whilst her most recent work has mainly concentrated on flowers and plants in gardens and hedgerows, she has also regularly produced drawings and paintings of potted plants and cut flowers in vases.

An emphasis on pattern is evident in much of her work. A drawing of a dead sheep on a beach in Anglesey, from 1979, is particularly notable for the precise rendering of the pattern, both of and on the stones and pebbles. This interest in pattern was also evident in her later drawings and paintings of the swirling and flowing patterns in water and in her drawings and paintings of undergrowth.

By 2012, when she exhibited work as part of Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival, Pat had begun to produce a series of highly detailed paintings of flowers and plants. Derived from her own photographs of gardens, she developed a technique of cutting up and combining the images to create vibrant and dynamic pictures.

Photoshop was used to develop the designs, though more conventional approaches of drawing and painting in sketchbooks, plus the cutting out and collaging of prints, were also used to create the finished compositions.

This work was both a new departure, and with its emphasis on colour and pattern in nature, a logical development of previous work.

She has tackled a variety of subjects, although always drawing on her immediate surroundings and experiences, both at home and on her many travels abroad. Pictures of Nero, her pet Labrador - on his own, with the artist or her husband, or with Pat’s mother - and gouache studies of her Macclesfield home, are early examples of this approach.

Three of the many stages in the development of the design of the 2018 painting, Sheffield Hot House Plants - the finished painting shown below