Ippy Patterson
Ippy Patterson, Hillsborough, NC.
Photo by Richard Voltz
Writer, artist and Hillsborough local, Ippy Patterson, invited us to her home and her world:
DO WE REALLY EVER GROW UP?
I used to feel a fly could hurt my feelings, and there was a time when creatures lurked in every corner. Now I can tell myself that the black shape in the room at night is my coat and believe it. And the idea of my own death, unacceptable and horrifying at 8, now has its grace.
But the 8 year old is always right there. Sometimes I just want to go home, which for me was a cement house in the Andes where I lived as a child.
IS THERE A CONNECTION BETWEEN WRITING AND DRAWING?
My childhood passions were writing and drawing. I read lots of fairy tales where you go for twenty pages seeing what the author is saying in your Mind’s Eye and then suddenly this lush painting fills the page that may or may not change what you had imagined. There is a connection in that these are two methods of telling a story.
I practice several different drawing styles — figurative to fantasy to abstract — and over the years I have tried to analyze how my mood varies with each. With life drawing and plant studies, one quick and the other more protracted, I feel myself becoming the shapes I am looking at.
With the “electricity” drawings I am in a kind of trance. With the big wall “hair” drawings I am trying to turn inchoate feelings into form.
As to whether one or the other of these expressions connects to the writing I do, my answer is, not that I can tell.
I think drawing is primal. Humans are meant to draw. I noticed this when I guided Duke med students through a winter of weekly drawing sessions in the Anatomy Lab — so many of these future doctors were terrific at drawing. It is as though drawing comes from the part of the brain that perceives space and is therefore visceral, inherent, necessary. Writing is more complex.
Writing is so hard it is exhausting. Writing takes you into your head where you are groping through these sprouting, coalescing, dissolving ideas. A jungle where for the most part you have the luxury of not having to interpret because you’re the only one there. Until you try to write and then you have to grab onto a vine and swing towards a clearing, all the while plagued by the notion that everything you contemplate saying could be entirely different when looked at in a different light.
I am working at present on a project that thematically connects writing and drawing. I began the drawings years ago as a way to see if I could better understand some of my fears. But I also also wanted to honor the kind of book that meant so much to me as a child, the kind of book that weaves together words and pictures. I’m calling it Boogeyman Memoir and it will be an odd, illustrated prose poem about my childhood in an Anaconda mining camp in El Salvador, Chile.
Working on these particular images has been meditative even when the scene is disturbing.
Drawing takes me OUT of myself. It is simultaneously energizing and calming. Writing takes me INTO myself. It can be maddening. If I sit down to draw my shoe, I focus and proceed. 5 minutes or two hours later there is some kind of drawing on the desk. Whereas if I sit down to write about my shoe I might be here next week on the couch with my laptop with maybe nothing to show for it. I might write a paragraph and change every single word a thousand times. Something I don’t do with drawing. I can’t erase the ink or the charcoal. And even if it were a pencil drawing that involved some erasing it would still for the most part be a shape that steadily grew closer to completion. It’s weird. You would think it would be the opposite. That writing would be linear. In my experience it is radial. Spherical, actually.
Ippy Patterson in her home, Hillsborough, NC.
Photo by Richard Voltz
WHY NOT PAINTING?
I’ve never learned how to apply paint and how to deal with color. One exception is that I enjoy using super watered down watercolor on newsprint. Also, I have made abstract pieces that began as drawings and became quasi-paintings. They are 4’ x 8’ panels of plywood which I coat with a base and then cover by running back and forth with 9B sticks of graphite and oil pastel, plus watered down house paint that drips out of the bristles and onto my hand. I feel ecstatic while making these, it is a whole body experience — but if I go too far I can feel distraught, thinking I have lost rather than gained something. I like the quiet and simplicity of transparency, negative space, openness. I love drawing partly because I really love paper…. I just love seeing the mark someone made floating there on all that blankness. It’s fantastically exciting. The energy of it. The transmission through the arm on through the finger to the plane.
The way you can see everything that happened. The ongoing reference to empty space, where it all began and always will begin. That really moves me.
Susan I, 24 X 36 Charcoal on news print. Private collection.
IS THERE BEAUTY WITHOUT DARKNESS?
Definitely. Maybe most of all in architecture and design. Geometry is free of darkness.
And in the sunrise! These can be joyous experiences of unadulterated beauty. But for the most part, with literature, film, art, music, I am excessively attracted to darkness.
WHAT IS THE MOST EFFICIENT METHOD OF PRESERVING A DRAWING?
It is fantastic that museums are masters at conservation. So we can see ravishing things that were made thousands of years ago and feel so much love for the people who made them. I think I would have been fulfilled being a museum conservationist, I love history and I am so moved by what humans make, have made, how objects can last and speak across centuries.
But I don’t think that everything at home needs to be under museum glass. We know enough to understand that nothing lasts forever. It is humbling to remember that we are living in what is, geologically speaking, a seemingly rare moment of planetary stability.
Much of my stuff is on newsprint. So off the bat this is kind of an anti-conservationism. I just use a second sheet of paper for protection (which actually has the side benefit of wicking up excess charcoal). Later, when I have gone through and decided which drawings to toss and which to keep, I’ll put the keepers in acetate sleeves. I have a love-love relationship with newsprint. I don’t spray the finished/kept drawings to keep the charcoal in place, nor do I spray the paper to de-acidify it. My husband and I have some of my 40 year old framed-life drawings that still look good. Newsprint breathes. It hangs like cotton cloth. Its tone deepens. It tells us time is passing. I take digital photos of the newsprint drawings. Ha! It is a toss up which might last longer — probably the newsprint.
WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR STRENGTH?
In the fact that it is always possible to make the effort to discover the truth about something.
And in the calm that comes from concentrating while drawing.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE TIME OF THE DAY?
The darkness just before dawn. I think because I have memories of being awakened in the mining camp to go trout fishing in the Andes with my father at that hour. I still love starting a road trip like that. Or wandering around the kitchen thinking of all the other human beings on earth who might be awake. That feels sacred.
DO YOU SELL ORIGINAL ART?
Yes. I just had a show at Dave Wofford’s PS 118 in Durham where lots of things went home with people. Folks can write to me on my website or DM me on Instagram. I don’t do studio visits.
And at the moment I am mostly focusing on writing because I am trying to get Boogeyman Memoir done.
