Iain Patterson

View works. Iain Patterson
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Artist Statement
“My work seeks to express something through real and imagined experience and physicality. I don’t ‘plan’ the images beforehand but rely on a certain spontaneous impulse and action.
The method of drawing and painting has an emphasis on improvisation around a theme with technical means which are deliberately formalist, limited and simple. My primary influences come from the natural world and from music - improvised music.
The work aims to be as inventive as possible within deliberately constrained and traditional structures. The challenge for the artist is to make new and original art within these boundaries.
Though abstract in appearance, both the drawings and paintings retain a strong organic and rhythmic presence.”      (Summerhall)
“I’d like to be as much of an intense maximalist as an austere minimalist”
“I like the balance between an obvious drudgery and a fleeting gesture”
 
  • Born Ayr, 1946
  • 1964 – 1969 studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art
  • 1970 – Post Graduate ECA
  • Andrew Grant Travelling Scholarship to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania
  • Schoolteacher in Edinburgh 1972-75 and Argyll 1975-77
  • 1977 – 2008 Lecturer in Drawing and Painting, Edinburgh College of Art E.C.A.

Taught in the School of Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art for 30 years. He specialised in teaching Life Drawing, Anatomy and Painting Composition to students from First Year Studies to Post Graduate Scholarships.

With a particular interest in vernacular architecture, he renovated a croft house in the Hebrides over 15 years.

 

The Architectural Museum in Wrocław and Dum Umení in Ostrava (Kabinet Architektury) provided the opportunity to show artwork and give talks on ‘Architecture Without Architects’.

 

The talks at Vila Trmalova and Vila Tugendhat in Brno on Charles Rennie Macintosh linked Scotland to the European Modernist World.

 

Collections
Include the Scottish Arts Council, Museum of Modern Art, Lódz, Poland, Borsod Museum, Miskolc, Hungary, Museum of Modern Art, New York and numerous private collections.