Free to Become an Artist
I attended the Barn as a child, and I was an off-and-on student in the 1980s. My mother was friends with Nancy Witt in high school, and funny enough, Pat was her high school teacher at one point.
I have many memories of Pat. I always thought of her as magical when I was young. (To be real, I still feel that way to this day.) Whenever Pat was around she would take me on a journey into a free spirited realm of the fine arts like no one else I had ever encountered as a young person. She would embody the spirit of the artist and open my eyes to the richness of the visual world. She taught me to see for the first time and made me feel like my daydreamer’s sketches were part of a bigger reality that, in turn, I was a part of.
I was never a very good student in school, but I loved to draw. Pat’s stories about being a struggling student that became this magical artist gave me direction and hope for my own dreams of doing the same. I think this freeing of my heart’s desires to become an artist was the best lesson anyone could have ever brought to me, and it is a gift I try to give to my own young art students to this day.
Pat always had this wonderment for the world. She might have been the only adult I had ever meet that embodied wonderment in my young life, and I found it intoxicating. Knowing Pat made me have the confidence to follow my own path and become an artist. I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor. Drawing apples in her studio as a teenager with charcoal and chalk—daylight spilling across the floor, and the smell of the oil paint- and turpentine-soaked studio stuck in my nose—made me first fall in love. It’s a feeling I still have to this day anytime I’m in her studio or open a new bottle of turpentine.
I went on to become an art teacher just like my dear mentor. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m currently the Advanced Placement Art Teacher at Millville High School. I’m also the Director of the Maurice River School of Painters and the Instructor of the Friday Night Teen Class at the Barn Studio of Art.
