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Buffalo News, art section, Gusto, Patrick Willett, Currents, New Work by Patrick Willett
“Upper Niagara Rapids,” a painting by Patrick Willett, is in an exhibition of the artist’s work opening Friday in Studio Hart. 

Painter Patrick Willett captures the ebb and flow of nature in Studio Hart’s ‘Currents’

For some artists, the act of painting or drawing can be a cheap and effective brand of therapy. That’s the case with a recent body of small-scale work by Buffalo watercolorist Patrick Willett opening Friday in Studio Hart (65 Allen St.).

The show, “Currents,” features ink and watercolor paintings on paper that depict surging waterways and windblown fields in a free-handed way that gives the viewer a sense of motion. The pieces, Willett said in his statement for the show, are an attempt to “capture the rhythm of energy that surrounds us in everything we see, hear and touch” and draw on natural rhythms such as “the ancient humming of the cicada, the ebb and flow of the rivers and lakes and the grinding of rock by rapids.”

Willett wrote that he created the pieces under some difficult personal circumstances, information that provides food for thought about the way art – both creating it and looking at it – can be a much-needed refuge and relief.

– Colin Dabkowski