My Story
by Patti Heid
EVERYBODY HAS A STORY:
My first vivid memory (aside from watching the corner of the coffee table approach before slamming into my forehead as my wiggly body slipped from Grandpa Heid’s arms) is visiting my Dad’s paint shop. Sitting in the front seat of a brand new robin’s egg blue ’57 Thunderbird, I visualized color options while I deeply inhaled the white tuck and roll upholstery that smelled just like my new doll’s head at Christmas.
My Dad’s favorite thing in life, aside from shooting and eating small animals, was painting cars. We always had someone’s ride in our garage in various stages of beautification but that t-bird was it for me. Maybe it was the fumes from all those coats of lacquer still floating around or perhaps the painter gene was activated that day but since then a large portion of my wonder years was spent cruising the volumes of paint samples from the top shelf of his workbench. Ah, the joy of pin striping and the perfect tone gradations of the airbrush… I was hooked!
Winning the art contest on the back of the CRISPY CRITTERS cereal box proved there was a big future for me in the Art world.
At age 10, coming home from Sacred Heart elementary and finding that Major Award, a printing press in a box with MY NAME ON IT, validated me. No doubt about it, there wasn’t hot lunch poster contest I couldn’t win.
Taking all those commercial art courses and rolling them into a fine arts degree was probably the best thing I could have done. The excruciating airbrush exercises really humbled me and honed my trigger finger. For years I subscribed to the photorealist sensibility and painted up a storm. Unfortunately, wearing a respirator was never really promoted. After several bouts of pneumonia, curtailing my formidable airbrush habit was highly recommended…
Fortunately, a great friend became a computer mogul and swapped some large art for a brand spanking new one of a kind high tech tangerine metal flake streamlined baby with all the bells and whistles (not the correct technical jargon I must concede).
The specter of two compuwhizzers flying in for two intensive days spewing their font of info into my fume laden brain rattled me. A quick hypnosis session was an apparent necessity. (It worked, though I still occasionally walk like a chicken) Now this large format video/computer/ printer system has saved my lungs by transferring 88.273* of the imaging to my canvas leaving the fun stuff for me i.e.: transforming these pixilated images on canvas into the gloriously veiled, glowing, 1/1, original airbrushed apparitions you are undoubtedly wondering about…
The mixed metaphor organic meets visual electronica, can be used to describe these highly textured images that contrast with the rapidly evolving, high tech, high speed world of technological advances and accelerated chaos. Technically, the images are originally composed on video evolving to a UV coated digital image on canvas that has numerous layers of airbrushed acrylic to glorify the colors and personalize each painting before it is embellished with laborious hand stitching. The introduction of beads, painstakingly hand sewn with sequins, crystals, pearls, feathers, gold and silver bullion, and an unusual collection of mixed media on canvas bring a subliminal essence of humanity to the paintings.
The images spring from “an active mind and a keen imagination” according to last week’s fortune cookie, though they are really a composite of my personal experiences as a child of the sixties contemplating mysticism, contemporary icons, social insanity, nuclear testing, the voices within, techno art vs. “the primitive method of painting with hair on a stick”, and watching the cable TV station without a decoder while trying to raise two kinetic originals.
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