Pat Badt is an artist who has studios in Orefield, PA and New York, New York. She was born in Santa Monica, CA, attended to High School in NYC, received her BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania where she studied with Neil Welliver, Rudy Burckhardt, and Yvonne Jacquette among others.
Most recently PB was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, Fall 2019. She has been the recipient of an NEA for painting and has attended artist residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and international residencies in Iceland, Italy and Portugal. She has exhibited widely including exhibitions in Brussels, New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Her work is included in collections in the American Embassy in Riga, Latvia, the Ruth Hughes Collection of Artist Books at Oberlin College, Bryn Mawr College, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, the Allentown Art Museum and private collections. She is an Emeritua Professor of Art, Cedar Crest College.
Pat Badt, with Scott Sherk, curated PastPresent at The Allentown Art Museum 2015 and Plain & Fancy, a traveling exhibition in 2019-2020 among others.
Pat Badt’s work is inspired by location, filtered through experience and sensibility. Her studio is in a white barn along the Jordan Creek, surrounded by apple orchards, low mountains and the convergence of two creeks. She also maintains a “pied-a-terre” studio in New York City.
About the Artwork:
“The inspiration for my painting is what’s around me. It can be something I see when I’m taking a walk, it can be something outside my window,…it can be a memory that I want to lock by making it visual. So, lots of different things, but it has a source.
I paint the idea of the object without the object. I’ve been really interested in the color of lemons or the color of an orange and try to paint it not just from its color but also from the feeling, the taste that you have, the texture of the skin, all those things…
I live in the Lehigh Valley, that’s where my main studio is, and I live in a more rural setting—there’s an apple orchard and a field of corn or soybeans outside my studio window that constantly inspire me.
I keep a sketchbook journal that I use to work out color ideas and make notes to myself, things I want to do, and that’s where the idea for September in July started.”