A Lifetime of Inspiration - Artist Patricia Nix - Brief Article

Artist Patricia Nix started creating art before she could talk, a talent that has taken her from Texas to New York and into the company of masters

She doesn't know whether it from God, or from a past life. But she's certain of this: It came with me. And it's the reason I'm here."

Artist Patricia Nix is talking about the origins of her talent--talent that's taken her to the top of the contemporary art world.

When Nix created her first painting at age 11, she didn't know that one day she'd exhibit her work alongside such contemporary masters as David Hockney, Willem DeKooning, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. She didn't know when she finished that painting that her work would one day sit in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

But she did know this: "It wasn't bad, I tell you," she said of her first painting, a copy of a rose that she saw on a greeting card that belonged to her mother. "I was astonished that I could do it. But darling," she added, in her native Texas drawl, "it's just what I am. I was making art before I could speak. It's never anything that I had to try to be. I just kind of was."

That natural talent took NIX from her El Paso, Texas, roots to her New York City home, studio and 50-year career. Though she's known among critics as the founder of the American Baroque movement, she's known among fans as an artist with an eye for color ("God gave me this wonderful color sense," she said) whose unique view of life is stamped on each piece.

That view of life is evident in everything Nix does--whether it be a flower study, a box assemblage, or a piece in her "Handkerchief Series," where Nix used real handkerchiefs, paint, paper, cloth and found objects to create this sculptural work. Her inventive approach is what Dick Kleinman, owner of Cleveland's Dick Kleinman Fine Art and one of Nix's top dealers, said draws people to her work. "They like her colors, the boldness of her work, and the fact that it's very different from anything else that they've seen," he said.

Different? Consider "Elizabeth I Variation," a painting in which Nix covered a depiction of Queen Elizabeth in, well, beetles. How did she arrive at the idea? "I had done two paintings called `Black Queen, White Queen,' which had lace on the dress," she said. "I was lying on the sofa one night, looking up at them, and the threads of the lace began to look like insect legs. I thought, `Wouldn't it be fabulous to have beetles all over her dress instead of lace?'"

But according to Nix, most of her work is unplanned, spur-of-the-moment. "I never know where the picture is going until it shows me," she said. "Every picture I start is like my first. I don't have any set parameters or rules. One thing I do just leads to the next." Which is not unlike Nix's artistic career.

Married at 17, the mother of three who said she "hasn't wasted one minute" commuted between New York and her native Texas at the beginning of her career while attending classes at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil in 1972. Five years later, a friend read that Madison Avenue's Kolodny Gallery was planning two contemporary exhibits and urged Nix to send her work in." I sent my slides and they immediately accepted me," Nix said.

But that was only the beginning. In 1981, Nix participated in "Joseph Cornell and Kindred Spirits" at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, N.Y., where the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art's Lynda Rosco Hartigan approached her. "She came over to me and said, `Are you Patricia NIX?'" NIX said. (Hartigan is an expert on Joseph Cornell, who is world-renowned for his box work.) "She said, `Your boxes and Cornell's boxes are singing to each other across the room.'" So began a beautiful relationship, one that lead to the National Museum acquiring "Toy Shop," a box by Nix, as a part of its collection.

But it's clear that Nix isn't driven by accolades and attention. Art chose Nix. And she wouldn't have it any other way. "All the time when I'm painting, I just thank God," she said. "I'm blessed beyond words. I realize it and I'm grateful. Being an artist is just like being alive to me," she concluded. "I've never been anything else."

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