By: Alexander Rivero

    Pat Olds of Washington, NJ, at 86 years of age, is as in love with painting today as she was when she first picked up the craft as a little girl in southern California. She grew up in Los Angeles, as she puts it, “a sickly child”, which pushed her father, an amateur artist himself, to buy her some drawing supplies to keep her entertained. She fell in love with the idea of creating her own visual worlds on paper, and never let up ever since. 

 “My father was my first mentor,” says Olds by phone, “and he was also an amateur artist himself. He’d do portraits in pastels, and then I’d want to use pastels, so he’d give them right over.” 

While honing her craft as she grew older, Olds tried her hand at sculpting too, and did well with it, going so far as to work with live models. But she always felt more at home with paint and drawing, a love that brought her to art school in California, and then to a job drawing houses and buildings for real estate firms in pen and ink. 

 “Even in those roles I managed to add some creativity,” says Olds. “If I was drawing a house by the water, for example, I’d make sure to put a sailboat somewhere out there, or include a couple of seagulls for effect.” 

Soon afterward she got married and had children and, not too long after that, moved with her family to Long Island where her husband was hired to work for American Airlines. She continued her pen and ink drawings on the east coast, producing real estate drawings for firms, but stopped the practice altogether upon moving out of Long Island and over to New Jersey, near Oxford. 

 “I fell in love with Jack’s Barn in Oxford and I did it in pen and ink, and they absolutely loved it and bought it,” says Olds. She also drew some quaint schoolhouses in the area. 

 Throughout all this time, Olds also began going to horse shows to work on her technique in painting horses. Satisfied with her progress, she expanded by drawing dogs and cats, as well. And as her skill set grew and grew, she went on to paint donkeys, pigs, roosters. Each new animal represented a new challenge for Olds as each had its own specific series of attributes that she needed to focus on and capture correctly. 

“I really loved horses a lot,” says Olds. “I have all these books that are filled with portraits of horses. Of course, everyone that has horses has dogs, so you end up painting them too. And even parrots.” 

 From animals she expanded further to landscapes and scenes, using watercolors—a technique she learned from friend and teacher Ed Whitney—to capture natural scenes they would visit personally. 

Soon after this, Olds—as a true lover of her craft is bound to do—expanded even further, taking lessons from portrait painter Richard Cardiff and practicing her skills on live models. 

Asked which of her many drawings or paintings over the course of her long career does she feel she is most proud of—or perhaps a list of drawings or paintings—Olds hesitates to respond. 

“It’s hard for me to pick only one or even several because I love them all,” she confesses. “But if I had to say one I’d say that I’m really grateful I painted this one bunch of red roses, and I’m happy I painted it when I did because I don’t think I could do as good a job now as I did back then.” 

Olds keeps looking for fresh ideas to paint. Her search for new ideas is by now not a hobby but a way to view the world. 

“Just the other day I found a beautiful blown glass vase for four dollars. I fell in love with it and bought it. I had to paint it, and I did, as an eight-by-ten watercolor.”

In a world of such tumultuous change, it is refreshing to see a person carry a passion born to her in her infancy all the way into her golden years, a full lifetime of passion, a platform from which to take in her world. 

    
    If interested in seeing some more of Pat Olds’s work, head over to Kathy’s Cove in Washington, NJ, where she has several paintings hanging on the wall.

    Says Olds, “Every time I paint I feel as if though I’m a kid in a candy store. I can’t have any other job. I never could. I couldn’t even imagine it.”