The following reviews and critiques of Pat Dunning's work reflect the reports of "someone to watch".
In her abstract work, Dunning forgoes recognizable subject matter for a direct expression of emotion and mood. Juxtaposing hard edges against soft edges, hot colors against cold colors. Beyond the immediate painterly and sometimes impasto surface of the canvas, she reaches for subconscious mind images as expressed in the dynamic tension created by her contrasts, her demanding colors, and her balanced compositions.
Barbara Voigt, Director
Public Relations
DuPont Galleries
As a woman and artist, Pat Dunning's paintings are a visual representation of a concentrated physical and emotional state of being that she shares with many other women, the specter of an uncertain future determined by the painful reality of being a breast cancer survivor.
The highly emotionally charged abstract paintings are, without question, a directory to the artists' internal struggles with life/death battle hidden behind the facades of her tranquil physical presence. As documents to a dynamic inner creative energy, the large than life images discharge anger, hostility, and self-pity; as well as, a sexuality of startling proportions.
Dunning's honesty may be difficult to deal with for some, but it is in fact this very honesty that generates the power of the images. In a period when blandness rules the day, Dunning's paintings exert a presence of emotional turmoil connected to a state of acceptance that dismisses blandness with a feminine reality seen in an unflinching cold hard light -- a light that illuminates one of life's darker aspects.
Gene Markowski, Professor of Art
Trinity College
Washington, DC
