Patty Rogers

Patty Rogers received her BFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1986 and her MFA from California State University, Fullerton in 1989. She has lived and worked on Bainbridge Island, Washington for more than two decades, and has been exhibiting at the Roby King Gallery on the island since 1999. Her practice is built from paper — layers of collaged papers form the surface, which she then draws into with conte crayon and builds with acrylic paint and printmaking techniques.

The panels are mounted on thick wood rather than framed, giving the work a physical presence that matches the density of its surfaces. She thinks of papers as sustainable materials, both ancient and new. She starts with language.

Titles come first — drawn from conversations, something read, something overheard, something witnessed. In Siblings’ Lower Garden, Borders Wetlands, Against a densely layered ground of torn cream, gray, and pale green papers—their fibers and edges deliberately visible—a single stem with burnt orange and red flowers branches upward in stark silhouette. The blooms themselves are rendered in gouache or watercolor with careful gradations from deep crimson to golden amber, their petals spreading in five-pointed formations with visible yellow stamens, creating a sharp chromatic contrast that reads almost aggressively against the muted, weathered background.

The composition divides the vertical rectangle into busy texture above and below, with the flowering stem occupying only the right-center passage, leaving substantial empty collaged area that dominates the frame. The work risks a certain sentimentality in its presentation of delicate nature against decay, though the aggressive handling of the paper ground—torn, layered, stained—undercuts any precious reading of botanical representation. The Kotodama of Now works differently: Three stylized koi fish rendered in opaque white and brilliant red-scarlet dominate the composition's right half, their bodies layered atop degraded photocopied documents and handwritten East Asian characters that create a palimpsestic ground.