Patricia Pepin

Patricia Pépin lives in Bromont, Quebec, with her husband Pierre and her dog.

At the age of 9, Patricia took painting lessons. Like many young girls, she loves horses, and that’s what she paints most of the time. Later, she sketched them in the stables where she rode the horses. However, after a few years working as a groom for horse races, she left her job to work in a tombstone store.

She devoted herself more or less seriously to painting over the years, painting portraits, still lifes, outdoor landscapes and animals. In 1997, she attended the “Birds in Art” exhibition at the Leigh Yawkee Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, and was struck by the quality and possible diversification of animal art.

A year later, one of her paintings was exhibited there. From then on, her career as an animal painter has gone from strength to strength.

Apart from the courses she took as a child, Patricia is a self-taught artist. She learned to paint by observing the work of other artists, picking up tips here and there. Whilelm Kuhnert and Richard Schmid are among her favorite artists, to name but two.

She prefers oil on canvas, but occasionally paints in acrylic.

The use of light is very important to her; her subjects are almost always bathed in sunlight. She tries to capture a fleeting moment in nature, when the light is just right, the fleeting expression in a coyote’s eyes, the orange sparkle of a goldfish, or the graceful curve of a bird’s neck.

Patricia bases her work on photos she takes just about everywhere. She has traveled to Kenya, Florida, the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge and the Venice Rockeries, among others, to the Grand Canyon and other national parks in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, and more recently to California. In July 2007, she took part in a two-week trek along Lake Superior’s Black Bay Peninsula, accompanied by other artists and professional canoeists, to paint and photograph the area for an exhibition.

Patricia has won recognition from her peers, and three awards of excellence from the Society of Animal Artists, of which she has been a member since 2000. She hopes to continue painting attractive pictures and to remain at the heart of the wildlife art movement.

To see more of Patricia’s work, visit her profile