Old Growth Down by Patricia Hagen
Into the Woods
The art of Patricia Hagen
May 22 - July 7, 2025
Jeanette Best Gallery
701 Water Street, Port Townsend, Washington
THIS IS OUR TIME to come into the forest. Listen for the owl’s wings. Stand close to a fragrant cedar, and breathe.
“To be out there,” says painter Patricia Hagen, “there’s something it does to your soul.”
Into the Woods brings together dozens of her most recent paintings. Many were done en plein air, so Hagen has included a map showing where she started painting them — places in the forest near her home in Port Townsend and on the trail near Tamanowas Rock in Chimacum.
HAGEN, WHO MOVED to Port Townsend four years ago, is a native of the Northwest, and spent part of her youth in Portland, Ore. She’s earned two art degrees, a bachelor’s at Ohio’s Miami University and then her master’s at California College of the Arts’ Oakland campus.
She’s been walking, playing and painting in the woods ever since.
WITH HER ART, Hagen hopes to help people connect with the natural world — it's a balm, she feels, for when we feel stressed and alone. Her own walks, on the Peace Mile Trail at Fort Worden State Park, in Chimacum’s Valley View Forest, and on the trails just beyond her doorstep, fill her cup with inspiration.
Paintings such as “Night Watch,” “The Fawn,” and “New Year/New Growth” reflect this, with their images of trees young and old, water and sky, birds, deer, humans and other animals.
Yet Hagen doesn’t shy away from the reality of destruction. She faces it in her art. She also paints regrowth, often with a human in the frame.
“THE FIGURE MAY BE autobiographical, or a kind of every-woman,” said Margy Lavelle, who shows Hagen’s work at Edison's i.e. gallery in Skagit County.
“The person is in nature, observing or communing, sometimes dwarfed by the setting, the grandness. There is a delicate balance with human life injected into a scene where wildlife is the only other present,” Lavelle notes.
“There is both intimacy and witnessing taking place. There is solitude but never aloneness here. The deep connection is what Hagen is reminding us of.”
Hagen said she does fear for the survival of the trees. She’s heartened lately, though, by the Jefferson Land Trust’s work to preserve the forests and farmland around us. The artist has explored these places, hiking the public trails and marveling, as though she just arrived here.
“THE ESSENCE OF MY WORK is an exploration of this delicate dance between humanity and nature,” says Hagen. We are not mere observers, she believes.
We are one another’s protectors.