Artist, Printmaker, Watercolorist.
Pat Van de Graaf is an Artist and Printmaker. She is an Exhibiting Member of The Charleston Artist’s Guild in Charleston, SC and the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT. She is a summer resident of New Canaan, CT and has served on the board of the New Canaan Society for the Arts. She is an Artist Member and past member of the board of the Rowayton Art Center and an Artist Member of The Silvermine Guild of Artists where she has volunteered for many years and in many capacities.
Pat is primarily a printmaker and has been printing for over 25 years and studied at the Art Students League in New York City and Syracuse University. She graduated from The University of Bridgeport with a degree in Printmaking/Art History in the spring of 1990, having gone back to school as an adult student. She also studied with the late printmaker Jim Egleson and with University of Bridgeport professor and printmaker Jack O’Hara.
Although she enjoys doing woodcuts and especially Japanese woodcuts, she concentrates on etching, sometimes combined with silk screen techniques and/or hand-tinting. Pat’s prints have won numerous awards in local and regional shows and she is represented by The Spencer Art Gallery and the Charleston Artist’s Guild Gallery in downtown Charleston, SC and is part of many private and corporate collections.
Pat began painting in watercolors again after living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Surrounded by marshes and the sea in both SC and CT, she enjoys capturing their beauty with the unique qualities that watercolor brings to painting.
In the majority of her work, Pat attempts to simplify the elements in the objects she sees, thus re-defining them so as to best convey their own special and unique beauty or directed emotion.
See more of my work at Spencer Art Gallery and Charleston Artist Guild Gallery