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Pat Lewis lives in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire. She works in oil often using painting knives for her seascapes to produce thick sensuous strokes. She has spent most of her life being deeply influenced by colour. As a young child her grandmother, a dressmaker, used to sent her up the street to the shops in Burry Port to buy cotton reels and Pat would slip away - without the matching fabric - keeping the exact shade in her mind.
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| Pat used to design and make her own clothes, and when she was 15 she commandeered a lean-to (used as her grandparent's wash house) for her own apartment, which set her on course in interior design. This led to a love of planning and designing unusual colour schemes. After surprising her family and friends by painting her new living room a deep dark chocolate brown with rich green velvet curtains, she managed to persuade a monumental mason to spare her some white marble to build one of the first hole in the wall fireplaces.
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| Designing her own homes, converting cottages and finally making living gardens, always using her favourite flower colours of peach, coral, cream and lavender blues, has for many years fulfilled her predominant love of colour and design. Now oil painting is giving her continuing pleasure as she paints in the warmth and beauty of her open beamed studio in Llanelli. From her studio balcony there is a panoramic view of the sea and the Gower peninsular. |
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| Pat's pictures have been inspired by drawing on her memories and life experience - living within sight and smell of the sea in Burry Port where she spent most of her childhood down the harbour with her father Tregenna Lewis, a fisherman famous for his entertaining tall stories. |
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| Pat had the minimum formal schooling and is mainly self-taught but has had some sessions with hand picked private tutors - whose work she admires and she regularly attends the St Ives School of Art. |
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| A few years ago she visited Provence, where the lavender fields, yellow ochre earth and russet roofed buildings inspired her to write home to her friends that she had at last found her spiritual home. Further west in the French medieval port of Collioure, the Fauvism movement was founded and copies of Matisse's paintings are to be seen hanging on the old chateau walls. The strong colours of terra cotta roofs, yellow ochre, deep peach, russet and cream buildings, covered with all shades of purple and cerise bougainvillea and the surrounding brilliant turquoise blue seas are simply extensions of Pat's favourite colours and she now spends some time every year painting them - alternating her time between Collioure, St Ives and her home town in Llanelli. |
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| Her favourite painting 'Great Expectations' seen on the home page depicts her husband Gareth and daughter Catherine on Newport Beach when Catherine was expecting their grandchild Cerian in 1986. |
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| Pat likes her pictures to reflect her love of words. A painting of the orange- red sea brings back vivid childhood memories when the Royal Ordinance Factory would discharge its war- time waste TNT, forming a warm orange red inviting river as it bubbled past searching for the sea. "Warm and inviting - Wartime industrial waste - Warning! Keep away" Her father Tregenna would warn her to keep away from its colourful poison and many a man working there died with orange skin from significant 'unknown causes'. |
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| Pat has lived in Llanelli for over forty years, since her marriage. She loves her home and is content to spend hours in her studio - painting reading or discussing various plans and ideas with her husband Gareth. They have two sons, a daughter and a granddaughter. |
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