Sydney born artist Patricia Cooke moved to the tranquil green of the Hunter Valley in 2017. After completing a number of art studies she was unable to continue painting seriously due to the constraints of work and family. Now free to unleash her artistic bent and surrender to the passion of painting, her gloriously colourful abstracts are mostly with a botanical or sometimes landscape theme.

Over the past few years Patricia has preferred to work with acrylics over oils as the shorter drying time has allowed her to create quickly. She also loves to add chalk pastel, charcoal, crayon, pencil or whatever can make a mark or to make her work a little bit odd or quirky ‘even messing it up a bit if it is feeling a bit too normal’.

Patricia’s inspiration comes from all around her: the towering mountains, the colours of the dense foliage, the fields and the grasslands, birds and animals around the property gardens and dams with their beautiful array of natural calamity and hues.

Her art is intuitive and comes from somewhere within. Looking back she says she can’t remember how it happened – ‘Sometimes I rage and stew over it and sometimes I have moments of sheer bliss and that makes my heart sing’. Primarily her aim is to produce a painting that brightens the heart.