I woke up to an ample, sun-filled, white room. So snug in the big bed under the warm douvet. The winter day outside serving only to highlight the coziness.
I stumble downstairs to make coffee on a stove big enough to forge iron. Insight for the uninstructed; ferrets and cats do not follow orders. So begins a morning at Pat's.
I have known her since schooldays. I remember the first time I saw her. It was a cold, grey day. I was crossing the bridge at Villars. Suddenly, the sun illuminated this girl standing on the volley ball court at Beau Soleil; there were others but they stayed in the background. As I got closer, I noticed that Nordic face and her eyes. They can never quite be described and see in a spectrum just beyond one's own. In time we became friends.
Her house is of a stately dignity and presence.The style was once abundant in Connecticut and now not due to the bloating effect of hedge fund money on New England housing.
It was more grand-alliance formal in the previous generation. Seat to a gracious lady, devoted to family and community whose life was also an altar of quiet remembrance for dear ones lost in war. This was common then but no longer so much. A few mementoes linger. It is now an artist's home.
Dusty paintings are stacked against the dining room wall while unfinished works are on easels throughout the house; in bedrooms, the sun room, basement and elsewhere. The more recent work consists of color saturated landscapes; the greens of growing grass, the blues of water breaking winter ice and other hues for sky and earth.
The artist's earlier figurative works are gallant banners from causes long ago. The photography documents historic events. In my view, portraits are as much a reflection of the artist as of the subject. I see that the faces in Pat's paintings are not used to being looked at in that way of hers; serious from a core of stillness. North meets South in the work.
Kathleen Patricia Thrane, who signs her work KPT, is American in a refreshing, loving way. She shares her life with three children and their respective school and college age friends in addition to the three dogs, a cat and a ferret. The big TV is for watching baseball. Her son was a star pitcher in High School and is now a freshman at a Division I university.
Her passions are legion. Each arrived at organically and studied in a methodical, comprehensive manner; preservation, parks, landscape design, cats, trees, local history, paintings, baseball, sculpture and more. Her art and life expressed in living things and still.
Oliver Tambo, whom she describes as a "shy, reserved, wonderful man" viewed her with love, as a daughter. She recently donated some of her South African photographs to the UNESCO Chair and Institute of Comparative Human Rights at the University of Connecticut in addition to lending some paintings. The photographs were taken in 1986 in Cape Town and Crossroads. She lived in townships and at one point, the ANC had to hide her from the forces of the Apartheid government.
I asked her about another painting in the house. It is set in the Phillipines. She was there "almost a year. I forget if it was 84 to 85" or later. It documents the "survivors of a massacre in Escalante in Negros." They are marching for land, survival and democracy.
Over the weekend, we visit some of her colleagues. Like Pat, they are American artists leading private lives. Their work is often done in plain sight yet not seen, if at all, til much later.
John Hersey's house is set in a landscape that is itself an artwork. Trees silhouetted against a star-filled night sky. Pat was consulting with Cannon Hersey on their collaborative effort 'Crosspath Culture; Global Community Building through Art'. It has focussed on South Africa but Pat hopes to expand the concept to other parts of the world. I think she will.
On the wall, outside her room, there is a large print of a photograph she took. It is a migrating butterfly in mid-flight over open water. It is, in a way, a self portrait of the artist.
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