The Buzz!
The Richmond News, Sunday, June 11, 2000
Anna-Louse Pentland, Special to the News
Live Life Today, says artist
Some people create fabulous food in the kitchen, Pat Willoughby creates fabulous art.
Willoughby has been working on her new series of 44 paintings, entitled "Passion For Life", since last October. They will be unveiled during "Artists Among Us" this weekend. But she only recently escaped the corporate world and began living her dream. The transformation took place after her mother died.
"My sister and I went for a long talk on the beach. My parents put things off, they didn't get to do the things they wanted to do. We started thinking that we could end up in the same place if we don't do it now," Willoughby says.
So, two years ago, with an inheritance from the sale of her family home, Willoughby decided to take the risk and become a full-time artist.
"I was all set to put it in the bank and keep working and put art on the side. But the biggest gift they could give us was the rebirth of ourselves," she says.
After 17 years working as a word processing operator where she never felt fulfilled, she was more than ready for the change. So, she moved to a two-bedroom apartment and ended up setting up her studio in the kitchen, reasoning that it is the room with the best light anyways. Her sister, incidentally, also took a risk and decided to create fabulous food full-time.
She began dabbling in oils and acrylics in the late '80s, when she was still working, but abandoned it after a few years. When she experimented with clay sculpture in the early '90s, she knew she was on to something.
"That's when it started to take off and feel the stirring of passion," she says. "My hands were in it, so I felt I was really emotionally involved in the process."
Today, her apartment is jammed with bronze abstracts, as well as joyful, colourful pieces created with oilsticks.
"It's just started to evolve, and it was like I couldn't stop it. It was the most powerful influx of creative force," she says of her experience with that medium.
She says friends have compared her work to Keith Haring or to Vancouver's Joe Average, and there is indeed a close resemblance in style.
She compares using oilsticks to colouring as a child, and says it helped her to reconnect to the basics.
"I cut away all of the extraneous stuff and got back to the joy of life," she says. "They're almost like logos or symbols; I see it in a flash in my mind."
Willoughby says there's a piece of her in every piece of art, as well as a reflection of the masculine and feminine parts of her. There's the fashion dummy she got from Eaton's when they were closing their doors - she doesn't have all her parts. And there's 'Weightlifting Man', partly modelled after her coach.
"But the meaning of it was twofold, because it's about being able to lift the bar and achieving things I wanted to achieve," she says.
And now that she's taken the plunge, she's never looked back.
"Sometimes I visit my sister's house in East Richmond, where my office was. I remember driving this way every day to work and being so depressed. It's a big reminder that I'm not going that way - I will never return. This is the way my life is going to look," she says. Willoughby isn't sure her mother would have understood the kinds of choices she had made over the past few years.
"I think if she were still here, she'd be worried that I gave up my good job. At the risk of sounding metaphysical, I know that where she is now, she's saying 'Yeah, you found it! Keep going!' I have the spirits on my side."
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