Abstract, pulsating and witty…Here’s a mind that knows exactly how to manifest itself in color.

Camille Patha is one of the rarest artists in the Northwest: someone who has remained fully committed to a lifetime of developing an expanding practice and refining a personal aesthetic vision. Throughout her career, her painting has oscillated between the figurative and the abstract. With Perpetually Forward, she demonstraters her fullest mastery of pure abstraction of her career, presenting canvases that embody wholly her imagery and vocabulary with unwavering voice and shocking vigor.

Patha asserts her power as a painter by creating imagery of a complete universe that enables the viewer to be absorbed fully within a boundless volume. She emphasizes the illusion of infinite space magically suspended within the thinnest film of the painting’s frontal plane. Remaining with her idiosyncratic palette of peach, orange, yellow, turquoise, and fuchsia, she constructs a web from layers of forms. Her sticky web — the holding of the viewer’s attention — is critical because she wishes to share a sense of wonder about the existential conundrums confronting every person.

Patha’s color has become more direct and pure, inviting us, the viewer, to explore the layering of multiple washes of semi-transparent hues, not mixed, but applied singly, to build the forms, one pure color over another. The luminous combinations define the forms but allow for exploration of the implied spaces created. No muddy mixing here, just clear crisp full strength color, one on top of another. Now the transition from space to space is achieved by the rendering of the forms themselves.

This impressive, concentrated body of work is testimony to a mature artist at the height of her powers.

Tacoma Art Museum’s “A Punch of Color: Fifty Years of Painting by Camille Patha” serves up a vivid, insightful retrospective of the Washington artist’s career.

…Camille Patha creates an art of illusion, personal evolution, social commitment and material exploration that ranges from hallucinatory landscapes, sexual symbolism, ecological tableaux and, in her most recent work, gestural responses to the environment that celebrate the pure materiality of paint.

Working continuously since her 1965 graduation from the University of Washington Graduate School of Art, Patha has exhibited widely in galleries and museums, often challenging existing orthodoxies of style and content with her deeply personal vision. Too young to be an Abstract Expressionist, she later adapted her own brushwork to an array of dynamic, colorful canvases; too young to be a Surrealist, she developed out of an American variant, West Coast Surrealism, that became the vehicle for her concerns with suburban sprawl, endangered species and, overlooked until recently, sexual imagery that Kangas calls “proto-feminist.”

This impressive, concentrated body of work is testimony to a mature artist at the height of her powers.

Patha should be congratulated for having prevailed against the privileging of men’s aesthetic expressions.

…the real deal is breathtaking.

Patha can be evocative without being provocative. She winks her eye, bends her finger, and bids us to enter her seductive terrain of checkerboards, dreamy landscapes, overripe pears, classical arches, endless skies. It is not so much that she promises us anything of substantive or concrete value, but rather if we allow ourselves the freedom to follow the byways of her fertile imagination, we will embark on a pleasant, and perhaps surprising, journey into the unconscious.

Whereas irrational though and/or intuitive art can be a rush of images, all tumbling upon one another, and us, Patha leads one carefully. She provides space, a minimum of objects. It is concentration and focus on a few elements. Whatever Patha chooses to portray, she does so with particular delineation and meticulous concern.