About Our Juror

Patricia Altschul

Patricia Altschul was born in Hempstead, NY and raised in Palo Alto, CA. She earned her BA and MFA with an emphasis in painting at UC Davis where she studied with Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri, Cornelia Schulz, Robert Arneson, Ralph Johnson, Jackie Winsor, and others. She subsequently worked in Togo, West Africa for USAID, taught at the Southside Art Center, in the Sacramento City School District,

conducted independent workshops in drawing, and was for 11 years an adjunct faculty member in the art department at American River College.

Patricia Altschul’s work has been shown locally and nationally and is in numerous private and corporate collections. She is currently represented by the B. Sakata Garo Gallery in Sacramento, CA.

Patricia Altschul’s work currently focuses primarily on the female figure in solitude but not exclusively so. The figure acts as an expression of the complexity of solitude in relationship to an infinite universe, and as a form of landscape painting. The paintings are a means to illustrate an abstraction of time, and our presence in time.

Her working images begin with memories or from photographs, which act as a visual reference, illuminating puzzles of gesture, dimension, and perspective. The work then proceeds from the intermingling of both photographs and memory.

The paintings are illustrations of the architecture of human solitude, the archeology of the soul, the limitless realms of internal worlds hidden from us, of the evanescent moment between before and after. They illustrate an inhabited silence, the poetry of solitude, of how we take root in the world, day after day.

Patricia Altschul works in a garden studio in Sacramento, CA where she is distracted by stray birds, her dog Fiep, and the changing seasons.