Baltimore Community FellowshipsGuidelines | Fellows | Fellows Profiles
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Baltimore, Maryland
2007
With a master’s degree in religion and the arts from Yale University, Deborah Patterson, 51, is a painter whose oils and watercolors show in galleries in Baltimore, Nantucket, and even as far away as Italy and Greece. Some of her paintings show idyllic settings in Provence and Tuscany. But she also finds great beauty in the Pimlico community, ravaged by high poverty, unemployment, drug trafficking and crime and where she has taught art in after-school programs for more than a decade.
Now, Patterson plans to use her fellowship to create an art program, develop a curriculum and teach art classes for about 150 children, ages 5 to 18, at the newly constructed Pimlico Road Arts and Community Center. But first, she plans to create art workshops for adults at the center. To recruit adults from the neighborhood, she also plans to knock on doors and plaster the neighborhood with flyers. "My secret dream down the road is to have the adults teach the kids," she confides.
Patterson plans to use a more traditional academic approach in her teaching, initially emphasizing establishing good drawing skills. "One exercise in particular uses charcoal in such a way as to switch the mind into the more creative right brain function," she explains. "Otherwise, it can be very frustrating to children when they move too quickly into detailed work, and it is precisely at this moment that they often give up."
For Patterson, her classes for both adults and children are about more than simply learning to draw. It reflects her more philosophical, even spiritual, approach to art. "Art is about looking and seeing differently," she says. "I want people to really open their eyes to the beauty in their neighborhood. Even if you live in a deteriorating neighborhood, there is beauty all around you. And I firmly believe that when you see beauty, it opens up a place in our soul and I’m all about that."
