Patricia Perry was born in Detroit. When she was 19, her family moved to Europe. She lived in Bad Homburg, Germany and studied at the Goethe Institut in Kochel am See before moving to Paris for a year and enrolling at the American College in Paris.
Moved by the works of Goya, Rembrandt, Turner and Blake which she saw in museums, she enrolled as an art student at UCLA after returning to the U.S. There she studied under Richard Diebenkorn, Irving Petlin, and Jan Stussy, receiving a B.A in Fine Art.
After graduation, she worked at the UCLA Art Galleries and the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum for their respective Directors, Frederick Wight and Peter Selz. In 1976 she moved with her husband and children to West Virginia, continuing her practice of the craft of oil painting. She says that her still life work “concerns itself with the essential but unacknowledged connection we have with the everyday objects that inhabit our lives, whose fleeting beauty we may barely notice. In painting my still lifes, I aim to ‘still’ or open a moment in time in order to allow both the artist and the viewer an opportunity to stop and remain quiet, and to experience the reality of the present moment.”
Her paintings are to be found in private collections in Philadelphia, Annapolis, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Pasadena, and Shepherdstown, West Virginia. She teaches oil painting at the Washington Street Gallery in Charles Town, West Virginia. Images and the possibilities that they present have always played an important role in Patricia’s life.