For Patricia Kreps, the Alliance Art Gallery’s featured 2nd Saturday guest artist, the desire to create art tugged at her throughout her life. She remembers the teachers who encouraged, the mother who bought her art supplies, her choice to be an art major in college. “I have always been a representational painter,” she admits, describing the effect a landscape has on her and how she paints to draw that quality out, working in oil.

But the driving force behind her art happened in Europe. Spending her junior college year in Strasburg, France, she immersed herself in French culture, art, and history. But it was a spring trip to the visually intoxicating tulip fields of Holland that catapulted her into an epiphany. “I think I had an aesthetic experience. The spirituality of that landscape sealed that for me. I wanted to record the feeling of that landscape.”

The softness of her oil-based palette and the visual flow that she captures draw the viewer into her vision of that felt beauty and spirituality that so moves her. We are invited into her sacred space.

Later, traveling to Greece for a year with her husband, again she experienced the sacredness of sanctuaries, antiquities, and the land itself.

Intertwined through these years, as a Texas-raised child, she earned her BFA from the University of Texas, followed by an MA in art history.

Back in Texas after her sojourn in Greece, she found herself drawn to landscapes that evoked that same type of epiphany in her. Moving with her husband to Missouri, where she has resided for the past 30 years, she took up teaching at Truman, then Mizzou and Stephens College. Kreps also got her MFA at Mizzou.

Driving back and forth endlessly along Route 63, she often stopped to photograph a scene, admitting, “I am obsessed with Missouri farmlands and meadows … and corn fields … and corn mazes.” Her snapshots capture the composition that attracts her. It becomes the starting point for the painting.

She tends to work in series: ponds, dead trees, flooded landscapes, North Carolina coastal marshes, corn mazes.

Landscapes, to have the spiritual impact she experiences, often become large 4’x4’canvases. But even that can be limiting as land flows horizontally. So she sometimes works in panels: two, three, or even four 4’x4’ canvases juxtaposed.

From the day she encountered the vast vibrant tulip fields in Holland to the rolling hills of Missouri, her eye seeks—and captures—the sacredness of land.

Ann Titus, Featured Member Fiber Artist
Why is art important? That is the question Ann grappled with, along with other board and staff members of the Quincy Art Center. Gradually one answer kept popping up. Connection. Ann explains, “That got me thinking about doing a new series. There is the beauty, the wonder, that comes out of connection. Even in situations of unresolve … there is a connection. Connections are hard, but that is where we unfold. That is what we are supposed to do. I don’t think we are made to be disconnected.”

Reflecting on this theme, she explains, “I had some work previously where I used a motif I really enjoyed—circles, orbs, donut shapes. I’m exploring how these shapes can represent people. They can interact, touch, connect.”

She began to create.

“Cautiously Contiguous”, which recently won Best-of-Show at the Quincy Art Center, embodies the connection where we may sit close to one another but not really be transformed in any way … like strangers on a subway.

“A Favorable Exchange” in Ann’s words, “features two orbs at the top, not touching, but there are visual elements that connect the two like exchanging information or ideas. A lot of energy.” One senses an outpouring of creative ideas, shared enthusiasms, pure joy almost leaping out of the fibers.

“How Can We Be Together,” is actually the first piece she created. Ann wonders, “How do we exist when different? How can we be authentic and still be together?” These are questions we grapple with today.

Forthcoming pieces? She is developing the design for “To the Point of Vulnerability” where orbs intersect in such a way as to lose their boundaries. Another she tentatively calls “Find Me” where there are lots of orbs, but which one is “me?”

Embarking on a series means a multi-year commitment. Her first series, “The Things We Carry” took three to four years to complete.

Like a story slowly unfolding, as each piece is added, the series takes on MORE power, MORE meaning, MORE connection. We become connected to the work, to the art, and in a way … find ourselves.

THE ALLIANCE ART GALLERY’S SECOND SATURDAY CONTINUES at 121 N. Main on March 11th. Enjoy artist-provided refreshments from 4:00 to 7:00. Receive your usual ticket to win a piece of art any time during the day. Brief talks by featured artist Patricia Kreps, and member artist Ann Titus at 6:00, followed by the drawing at 6:30. The winner, if not present, is notified.