About — PAT DUNIGAN

When I was 17, I had a summer job working as the assistant in the advertising department of the original Abercrombie & Fitch store on Madison Avenue in New York. (No, not the Abercrombie people know today. Abercrombie & Fitch was the world's finest store for all sorts of sporting, hunting & fishing equipment. It's where Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy shopped.) Every day A&F ran an ad on the same page of the New York Times, and my job was to get all the materials for that ad, have the art studio create the layout, and then take the "mechanical" of the ad to the NYT building on West 43rd St. on my way to Penn Station to go home to NJ. The next morning on the train back into NYC, I would see the ad (my ad) printed in the paper. That started my love of advertising.

College came next and I studied fine arts and languages. I wanted to work at the UN and travel the world. But, I took a painting class at Skidmore and turned a corner. I had my own studio at school and painted large Monet-inspired abstract landscapes.

After graduation when I was looking for a job in NY, I answered an ad for a studio assistant and discovered it was for Helen Frankenthaler. She invited me to tea at her home. All seemed great until she told me it was an unpaid job. Unfortunately, I needed a job that paid.

So, advertising it was...and is. I’ve loved it and have been able to travel all over the world shooting commercials.

Some years ago, I started passing the time in airports and on flights by tearing bits of color pages out of magazines and gluing them into a notebook. Those were my first collages. I love playing with the shapes and colors…having them clash and collide and finding their right place.

The collages are the first step. Next, comes the paintings - large paintings - sometimes defined, graphic shapes and other times I color “outside the lines” in sweeping brush strokes. Recent paintings explore forms found in nature - flowers, fields of grasses, vines. I love the “architecture”, the shapes and colors and work to bring them to life in unexpected ways.