Patricia Tewes is a painter based in Florida and Maine. She works in oil and water media, reflecting on the often dreamlike state of life.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Tewes Richards is a painter based between Florida’s Gulf Coast and Kennebunkport, Maine. Her work explores the beauty, vulnerability, and surreal mystery of the natural world through vivid, layered images that blend observation, memory, and magical realism.
With a background in biology and medicine, Patricia brings a deep understanding of living systems to her art. Her paintings often feature coastal plants, tropical environments, forests, water, and expressive figures—charged scenes that feel playful, sensual, and subtly haunted by ecological threat.
Originally from Long Island, Patricia studied biology at the University of Chicago and later became a medical doctor. Throughout her medical career and while raising two daughters, she maintained a dedicated painting practice. She later studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio School, and earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Her process often begins with sketchbooks—small drawings and paintings in pencil, ink, watercolor, and gouache made during hikes with her husband and dog. These visual notes become the foundation for larger works in oil, acrylic, and cold wax that build symbolic, emotionally rich worlds.
Patricia is a member of the Yellow Chair Salon, Women Contemporary Artists of Sarasota, National Association of Women Artists, and Art Center Sarasota.
Her work has been featured in Antennae: The Journal of Nature and Visual Culture, and she has exhibited nationally. She completed artist residencies at the Rokeby Museum (Vermont) and Château Orquevaux (France), and presented her work on the Painting the Plantocene panel at the Modern Language Association.
Awards include the Mercedes Matter Award from the New York Studio School and being shortlisted for Jackson’s Art Prize 2025.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Artist Statement
My paintings are immersive worlds built at the intersection of classical art, magical realism, and ecological unease. Drawing on references from art history, I create lush environments—gardens, forests, tropical landscapes, and seascapes—populated by expressive beings that straddle the line between human, mythic, and extraterrestrial.
These imagined realms are grounded in nature but shaped by emotion, memory, and metaphor. I use vivid color, symbolic forms, and layered textures to construct scenes that feel both ancient and futuristic—like dreams from a world adjacent to ours. The work is playful, sensual, and alive with visual curiosity, yet always aware of the underlying tension: snakes in the garden, beauty on the edge of threat.
Classical figures often inspire the forms and gestures in my work, reinterpreted to reflect contemporary concerns—especially our disconnection from the body, from nature, and from mystery. In these paintings, the body is not spectacle, but presence—a site of feeling, vulnerability, and story.
World-building is central to my process. I’m not just painting scenes—I’m constructing ecosystems of color and character, mood and metaphor. Each piece invites viewers into a symbolic space where they might feel wonder, discomfort, recognition, or unease.
I see these works as emotional landscapes for a time of ecological fragility and technological saturation. They offer a pause, a place to reconnect—with nature, with imagination, with what it means to be human in a shifting world.
Ultimately, I paint to create portals: alternate worlds where spirit and matter, play and danger, and the past and future can coexist in vibrant, layered harmony.
