Patti Trimble’s artistic practice is project-based thinking through contemporary environmental and social issues— engaging with visual art, poetry, music, performance, and installation.
In an earlier life, Patti studied environmental science at UC Berkeley, earned an MFA in painting from Hunter CUNY, sold work through Kathryn Markel, and was nominated for a painting award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. For ten years, she worked as studio assistant to older American painters: Balcomb Greene, 1930s founder of American Abstract Artists and Artists Union; and first-generation abstract expressionists James Brooks, Hedda Sterne, and Richard Pousette-Dart.
In the 1990s Patti began performing poetry with the late guitarist Bill Horvitz, a musician from the NY Downtown New Music Scene. She is known for interdiscipinary presentations of her lyric poems, collaborating with musicians, actors, and visual art in the USA and Europe. Her writing has been widely published, and her recordings—from out of round records—are on Spotify and Apple Music.
“My practice is in relation to community. I am forever thinking: What can I bring to the conversation? How can I disentangle from category and explanation, say the unsayable? How can I engage with the tangle? It’s a thinking through and with what I know and what I don’t know. But lightly, always listening.
For me, creative work is a back-and-forth evolution. Engaging with poetry allows for complexity, layering, merging disciplines and styles, and direct speech. I bring this freedom to painting, engage with painting’s own freedoms: to see what materials and the body knows. Also merging spiritual practice, science, contemporary news: letting discourses informing each other, wearing away differences.
My understanding of art making (including writing) seems an unbroken line from my abstract expressionist mentors. They were great teachers and friends; we shared existential dread and serious wonder, with a big dose of absurdity. I carry this cultural transmission forward, to today’s climate and humanitarian crises, with a vital curiosity about what it means to be human, and inquiry through acts of making.”