“Blue Iris” by Patti Nelson is part of an exhibit at the Coos Bay library. Contributed Art

Charleston artist featured at CB library

By Chip Dombrowski, Entertainment Editor

CHARLESTON - Patti Nelson began her art career with a weak stomach.

It was 1949, and at 18 she had left her family's Indiana farm to go to art school. One of her first classes was life drawing, which required working with a nude model. The first exposure sent her running out of the room feeling sick.

“I had never seen a naked body before,” Nelson said Wednesday at her Charleston studio. “I was an innocent little farm girl. But I wasn't the only one - there was a young man out there in the hall with me.”

While putting herself through school, she worked a pair of unusual jobs: as a topographical draftsman for the Indiana state highway department and as a runway fashion model.

The modeling was work that she remembers as much harder than people realize, but the drafting altered her artistic style. Drafting, she explained, requires a meticulous level of precision - something she didn't want to follow her in her painting. But she couldn't help being what she considered too fussy when using a brush, so she stopped using one.

She'd taken a break from art after school to raise four daughters, but fussiness was still a problem when she got back into it in 1968. That's when she switched to painting with a palette knife, a tool akin to a spatula.

“I still have a problem with it,” Nelson said. “That's why I don't do much brush work. I'm uptight; it helps me not to be so uptight.”

Friendly, animated and speaking freely about her life, Nelson certainly doesn't seem uptight, but at 75, she's had a long time to loosen up.

Along the way, she has worked in a variety of fields and locales, including teaching high school art and operating a bed and breakfast with her husband, David, who was an engineer. Before moving to Charleston in 2004, the last stop was Santa Fe, N.M., where she was a docent at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

Nelson has long been a fan of O'Keeffe: “She's a great woman - crazy, probably, but aren't we all?”

O'Keeffe's work was the inspiration for much of the painting Nelson has done lately, which will be on display at the Coos Bay Public Library beginning Monday. Nelson is the library's featured artist for the month of April.

The influence of O'Keeffe is clear in Nelson's vibrant, oversized flowers, but there's also a notable difference. Nelson's palette knife renders the delicate flowers rough, with sharp edges.

Fourteen works, mainly acrylics, are included in the exhibit. Along with the palette-knife flowers, there's also an abstract, a pair of human figures, a watercolor and another piece done with a brush, which were included to show Nelson's range. The brush painting, “Indiana Cornfield,” was one of three Nelson works included in the Coos Art Museum's Biennial exhibit last fall.

The cornfield refers to where she grew up, as one of 13 children in an artistic family. Her father was a musician as well as a farmer, and her mother and a sister were artists. One of Nelson's daughters, Joan, also became a well-known artist in New York.

“She's made millions from her art,” Nelson said. “I could never hope to Š but I don't try much. I mostly give away my work to my daughters and grandkids.”