One little cloud makes the sky seem bluer.
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| 12 x 24 and 6 x 9, oil on 2 wooden supports |
side view showing 2 supports, 12 x 24 and 6 x 9
August Blooms, 2013-14
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| 36 x 18, oil on panel with primary source material |
back of painting with primary source
Amish Night, 2014
Amish Night, I think this might finally be finished. I have been working on it for several years. It is quite built up. At one point it had been a diptych.
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| 30 x 24, oil on wooden support |
Wood Sprites, 2012-2014
Wood Sprites, my Daphne and Apollo inspired piece. I have been working on these for several years. I think they are finished now, or at least I am finished with them. They make me feel hopeful for spring.
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| 53 x 8.5 x 1, 72 x 8.25 x 1, oil on wood with live edge, |
The story of Daphne and Apollo, and two scraps of wood, inspired Pat Badt to make Sprites. Leaving the edges "live," she covered the slabs with paper and imitated the texture of their wood grain with oil paint by applying ruddy striations on the surface, achieving remarkable flesh tones reminiscent of Egyptian and European painting. She considers the taller, darker one male and the shorter, paler one female: Though separate, the pair uncannily cleaves each to the other in complicit harmony.
The piece evokes weather-red electromagnetic "sprites" that flare in the troposphere-and cloud-to-ground lightning bolts as a definition of desire: the spontaneous discharge of energy through
a charged atmosphere. Sprites explores what it means to be a pair, emphasizes the necessity of division and union in nature as a terminus for things to happen, change and change again Intervening minimally, Badt delivers poetic empiricism.
Elizabeth Johnson
Exhibited in Passing Bittersweet, Martin Center Gallery, Lafayette College, 2020
Passing Bittersweet features work that embodies ideas garnered from reading Lafayette alumnus Ross Gay's The Book of Delights. His chatty, humorous, open ended essays were culled from a year of daily asking himself: "What delights me?" Self-study and identity merge with the places, people, books, and routines that make Ross Gay happy. From inside what he calls "intense fleeting attentions," Gay maintains a practice of acknowledging what is beautiful in the midst of the brutal.
The artists of Passing Bittersweet were chosen not because they illustrate Gay's delights or process, but because their personal delights find aesthetic, physical ways to reframe negativity. The gathered artworks echo Gay's conviction that numberless, small, positive human actions and transactions dispel what is dark, lonely and unjust. Passing Bittersweet honors Ross Gay,The Book of Delights, and artists who validate vulnerable, peripheral,and oft-overloo.ked treasures of common experience.
Elizabeth Johnson, curator
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