Patricia Amlin

Patricia Amlin stands in her studio on Upper Canyon Road, mixing oil paints on a palette and contemplating her latest canvas. She steps back from the work, an ice-blue landscape of a mountain that is simultaneously representational and abstract. She crosses the room until she finds a chair some distance from her painting, giving her a sense of how she saw it when it first came to her - outside, on a snowy mountain, easel mounted en plein air and ready to capture the best of what nature has to offer.

A painter since she could hold a brush in her hands, Amlin revealed her extraordinary talent at the precocious age of ten, when she won a state-wide painting contest that earned her a scholarship to the esteemed Art Institute of Chicago she studied every Saturday morning through high school. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, where she studied painting and drawing before leaving to attend the Minneapolis School of Art to work with Oscar Kokoschoka. During the summer she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine.

There, Amlin was introduced to the New York School, studying under the likes of Max Weber, George Grosz, Isabel Bishop and Sydney Siman. Though Amlin had already had shows in Chicago throughout her schooling there, it was her association with Skowhegan that earned her first New York show at the Midtown Gallery when she was just 21.

That same year, Amlin was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Art Academy in Munich. She remained in Europe for almost two years. Upon her return to the United States, Amlin enrolled in graduate studies Syracuse University where she also taught fine art painting.

With her studies completed, she began to follow her ever-evolving pathway whereby her visual experiences of the world would lead her to the next step in her artistic career. It began in the summer of 1963, when a march of students and activists who were involved in the civil rights movement passed by her doorstep.

“It was the sight of them that intrigued me.” Amlin would say later. “I could have read a thousand manifestos and not been so moved. Everything they had to say made me wake up with a desire to right all of these wrongs. I could visualize a future where things were different and I wanted to work towards it, right away.”

Thus was born Amlin’s career as an artist-activist, a journey that she would follow throughout the rest of her career. Soon after, Amlin was seen protesting on television and she was let go of her teaching position at Syracuse, so she joined the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project whose purpose was to register as many African-American voters as possible. Because an elderly black man had been murdered the night before they were to leave, Amlin was among a handful of students who chose to stay in Mississippi to continue their work. Amlin’s residence had been the Freedom House, operated by SNCC & COFO. She then was employed by the Black Methodist College, Rust College, where she was hired to teach and chair the art department.

While in Mississippi, she taught painting, art history and world literature and continued to paint in the hallway of an old barrack. As the movement unfolded around her, Amlin decided that painting was elitist and she opted to be a film-maker instead.

“Film-making provided me with the ability to see people grasping existence, I would follow them with the camera capturing stories about what was really happening in the world at the time.” she said.

She married her first husband while still in Mississippi and moved with him to Berkeley, CA. She soon made a number of films related to the movement, including The Day We Seized the Streets in Oakland in 1968, and The Spirit of the People is Greater Than the Man’s Technology in 1969. But in 1970, Amlin’s attention was captured by a more metaphysical topic when she visited Tikal, Guatemala and saw Maya ruins and calligraphy for the first time.

What she saw in the artifacts led her to a belief that Maya pottery contained the story of Maya creation, known as the Popol Vuh. She decided that she wanted to make a movie about the Popol Vuh, using the pottery as a vehicle in a full-length animated film. She enrolled in graduate studies at San Francisco State University, where she earned a Master’s in Cinema. Joining the faculty at SFSU in 1973, it would take twenty years for her to achieve her goal, realized when she made the critically acclaimed animated film, Popol Vuh, the Creation Myth of the Mayas, as well as a follow-up film The Five Suns: A Sacred History of Mexico, both funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The films were highly successful at combining scholarly rigor to the histories they covered with great artistry and beauty in their execution. Both ultimately showed on PBS, in theaters and on college campuses around the world.

Today, Amlin is embarking on a new stage of her career as a visual artist, once again as a painter. Her canvasses are comprised of two different styles of work that are intended to communicate similar themes - the en plein aire paintings that she had been making for most of her adult life, as well as a new style of painting inspired by a trip to the Amazonian rain forest. Both forms offer new ways of seeing and experiencing the natural world.

“I stood on the edge of a swaying walkway high above the trees in the rain forest, “ she said. “From there I could see a new kind of landscape from above.” This new seeing resulted in her latest series of paintings that express the look of what is below from on high. This particular vision gives many of her paintings a “sky’s eye” view of the world from above, resulting in canvasses that offer a cacophy of both abstract and representational viewpoints of the world below.

In her en plein aire paintings, Amlin travels the world to the natural scenes she wishes to paint and dreams to capture both the literal representation of the scene as well as the abstract expressionism that the scene offers to her eye and brush. Combining both styles of painting, Amlin’s intent is to communicate the immediacy of nature and the divine intelligence at work behind the design of the world.

• From the heart of Gregory Pleshaw.