When a literal image won't do, Anna Patten expresses herself in abstracts.
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The term "aspiring" is double-edged. It implies a person is working toward some sort of achievement, but it also implies that achievement has not been reached.
When the term is used in reference to a creative pursuit — "aspiring" artist, "aspiring" musician, "aspiring" actor — what does it take to erase the "aspiring" part? Some would say it's the moment a person starts trying; that it's less a matter of outside validation as much as inner commitment.
Others say, no, you're not there until other people think you're there.
Three Downriver artists, Rosemary Bunea, Anna Patten and Erin Suess, had varying degrees of experience, education and accomplishment in their respective artistic careers. Now they share a measure of validation as the Downriver Council for the Arts' "Emerging Artists" for 2007.
"I've been an artist all my life, but I never really pursued it," said Bunea at a reception at the DCA's Home Gallery in Taylor for an exhibition of all three honorees.
For the past three years, Bunea has concentrated on painting — oil painting, specifically. She already had years of artistic knowledge, but a trip to Paris had a strong influence on her.
"I saw all those impressionists," she said. "The thickness of the paint and the colors were just amazing."
She was particularly taken with Vincent Van Gogh's technique.
"I was really impressed with his work, how he took his colors to the extreme, and his brushstrokes," Bunea said.
It was a style that lent itself well to Bunea's natural talents. Several of her paintings in the exhibition are portraits, and the Van Gogh influence is unmistakable.
A portrait might have an entire rainbow in the face or in the hair, yet it is the placement of small amounts of blue or green in a face that makes it not only acceptable, but integral. In a way, it replaces shadowing to create depth and character on the faces.
Bunea uses the same approach in her landscape paintings, letting her sense of color go beyond realism to make the images more exciting.
"Colors come to me pretty easily," she said. "If you put the cools where they belong and the warms where they belong, then it works."
She also has found that working fast, like Van Gogh, comes through in the energy of a painting.
"He worked on being very spontaneous, not trying to be precise and making something look 'good,'" Bunea said.
She said she spends only two to three hours on each painting.
The most recent of Anna Patten's paintings to be shown at the exhibition also is the largest. It is a self-portrait, seated at a table, with a glow emanating out from her.
"It's sort of a revelation of myself," Patten said.
In a way, the painting could be seen as a self-fulfilling affirmation of this time in her life. Of the three artists, Patten had the furthest to come and most hurdles to overcome to be selected for emerging artist honors.
"This is a big success in my life; it really is," she said as guests began to arrive at the reception.
At 34, Patten has dealt with health issues, including diabetes, and other obstacles.
"It's handicapped me in ways that I really don't like," she said. "I'm really a free person, but my sickness kind of entrapped me."
Creativity runs in her family, though she is the first to pursue a career in it.
"Three years ago, she started bringing her work in, and I encouraged her," said Adelina Fuentes of Fuentes Gallery in Wyandotte.
Patten's paintings have a simple style, influenced by gothic and fantasy imagery, and with a hint of her Native American heritage. But there also is depth in their character. While it can be said that every artist puts a part of themselves into their work, in Patten's case, every painting is a conscious sharing of some part of her life.
A portrait of a girl wearing pearls, titled "Annie," is a tribute to her grandmother.
"She used to always wear pearls," Patten said. "When I was little, I always wanted to wear them. I liked the shininess."
The painting just below it, she explains, called "Cultural Passions," represents the new love in her life. The figures are positioned so their necklaces seem to run together as one.
In good times and bad, Patten expresses her feelings in her painting. One of her abstracts, "Brokenhearted: Bones and Fire," depicts one of those times when her health was holding her prisoner.
"She was so sick," Fuentes said. "She broke her leg and there was a hole in her leg. She was laid up for some time, and there was fear she might lose her leg."
Patten sees this exhibition as the first step in a new phase in her life.
Erin Suess has made her living with her art for years as a graphic designer in the marketing department of the Detroit Newspaper Group. But while there can be satisfaction in that kind of a day job, she feels the need in her free time to let her creative instincts loose.
"I think it's the typical artist thing, when you're working for someone else, you don't have a lot of freedom," she said.
Photography is one of Suess' preferred mediums, and her works are collages of photos and sketches digitally combined to create surreal images that exceed the sum of their parts.
"This type of thing, I've just gotten into in the last couple of years," Suess said.
But the ways she combines and manipulates images shows fine-tuned veteran sensibilities at work.
That expertise can be seen in her treatment of one of Downriver's most familiar photographic subjects.
"That's the typical Elizabeth Park; everybody takes pictures of the bridges there," Suess said.
Suess took that familiar image, and added flowers, making them "float" on the water, far out of scale with the bridge photo. That, combined with manipulation of the coloring, gives an original, comically bizarre perspective to the shot.
All of her works have the tendency to draw the viewer in; the combinations of literal images imposed over one another in ways that are incongruous yet harmonious acts like a direct route to subconscious reactions.
The technique is just as effective when Suess adds her own sketches into the mix. In one example, a woman on a cross seems to haunt a photo of a wooded area.
"Sometimes I see something, and I want to draw it," she said. "That's what I do at 3 o'clock in the morning, when I have to get it down before I forget it."
The 2007 Emerging Artists exhibition will be on display at the Downriver Council for the Arts Home Gallery, 20904 North Line Road, Taylor, through April 13. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays and noon to 3 p.m. Saturdays during exhibitions. For more information, call 1-734-287-6103.
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