Today we’d like to introduce you to Patty Horing

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?

I was a late bloomer artistically. I started making art after leaving a PR career to raise my 2 children full time. What began as a hobby quickly became a passion and an obsession, but it took several years for me to come to terms with feelings of ambition and my growing desire to show the work. After years of working from a suburban home studio while my kids were in school, and honing my practice to focus on psychological portraiture, I realized that in order to take my work to the next level I needed to be part of a community of other artists. I spent a year doing informational interviews with friends of friends in the art world to figure out how go about finding that community, and ultimately went back to school. I pursued my MFA at the New York Academy of Art, where I learned all the techniques I didn’t know I didn’t know, and met a wonderful group of artists, Coming out of school I was picked up by Anna Zorina Gallery, where I have had three solo shows since 2017, and which continues to represent me.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?

It has been a winding and predictably unpredictable road. Initially, when I first started making art seriously, my challenge was to convince other people in my life that this was not just going to be a casual hobby. That happened over time, and as the work got some external recognition along the way. The art world has many tiers, many ecosystems, and can be a place of pressure and uncertainty, like any business. Though I’ve had more commercial success than I could have imagined when I was working in that attic studio years ago, there’s always something more to strive for. I find that while I can’t control outcomes, I can improve my odds by making an effort to see art out in the real world (and not only on Instagram!), have conversations with other artists, gallerists and curators I meet along the way, and basically show up for other people in the way I want them to show up for me.

But the joy I get from making the work– creating my own worlds of meaning– remains the grounding place of freedom and exploration that keeps me steady as I navigate new territory in the public sphere.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?

I am a painter whose artistic focus is paintings of people. I am interested in the narrative and psychological nature of portraiture. Contemporary paintings of specific people simultaneously raise questions and offer clues about individual identity and the larger cultural context in which the subjects exist. My goal is not simply to show what a person looks like, but to examine, through subjective interpretation, who that person is, wants to be, has been. Often the subjects’ material surroundings also reflect some aspect of personal desire or identity that is linked to the psychological underpinning of the portrait. By conveying a feeling for both the inner and outer lives of individuals through expressionistic portraiture, I hope to access a deeper underlying current of relatable human experience.

What might set me apart from others is probably my artistic style, which exists somewhere between expressionism and realism, and emerged like one’s handwriting does, naturally, in the course of my development as an artist. I try to express some of the paradoxical elements of living now, so my paintings often have elements of humor (I love to entertain myself with little ‘easter eggs’, etc) alongside more serious emotional and psychological expressions and scenes.

How do you define success?

Making the best work I can make, and having people who really connect with that work find it, feel something from the experience of looking at it, and enjoy it. Art is a long game (just ask the many dead artists who weren’t recognized in their lifetimes), so, while I want my work in important private and public collections, I think only element I can control is to keep making my work with authenticity and intent, and to put it out into the world to let it find those connections.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pattyhoring.com
• Instagram: @pattyhoring

Image Credits

Paul Takeuchi Photography