Submitted by Pris Sears on August 1, 2008

Pat West is a painter and a sculptor. She is a gardener, builder, parent, and traveler.

photography by David Franusich

Her home and gardens are an elaborate art installation. It's reminiscent of Howard Finster's "Paradise Gardens" in that there is something beautiful or unusual (or both) everywhere you turn. The entire landscape and home is put to work in the service of art. One could go back again and again and find things that hadn't been seen before.

Her home and studio are made up of multiple levels and layers of wood and glass and stone. The architecture is unique, primarily composed of indigenous woods and stones with unexpected accents. The house sits in Giles County, facing ancient bluffs across the New River. The gardens surrounding her home are extensive, with exotic potted plants and many native flowers and fruits. Artful objects are interspersed with the plants: large volcanic rocks, ranks of glass rods with blue bottles and glass balls topping them, unexpected toys and tchotchkes. Surprising and surreal touches share space comfortably with homey and naturalistic tableaux. In a field near the house is an old barn. The ground floor houses what looks like a wood-working shop and upstairs is a room filled with dozens and dozens of paintings.

West's humor is evident everywhere, from the collection of "birds in peril" paintings in the bathroom, to the Spiderman and kewpie doll menaced by Battle Cats in the garden, to the painting out in the barn entitled "Too Late to Save Grandma" (it features a wolf on a glittery red background, beside a pile of meat and bones).

Like Howard Finster, West didn't go to art school, and could be considered an "outsider artist". However, her art is more sophisticated than Fisher's, and lacks the religious zealotry. She has been in Southwest Virginia since she came from Norfolk and enrolled as one of the few women students at Virginia Tech in the early 1960s. She's been building her home in Giles County since the 1980s, in an ongoing work-in-progress that sprouts organically from its surroundings.

West credits Ray Kass' art salons at Mountain Lake as the first time she was taken seriously as an artist. She had her first solo art show in 1980 in Roanoke and has been showing ever since. She is probably best known for her oil paintings, which hang in a variety of local businesses. She has many paintings on display, along with arrangements of flowers from her gardens, at "The Bank" restaurant in Pearisburg, where her son is the head chef. She says, though, that her favorite art pieces are the ones she creates in the woods around her property, the odd things that no one sees and which can't be sold.

The public can visit some of West's art at her new show, "Far Away," at the Perspective Gallery. She will be showing paintings of the 100-day journey she and her daughter took from Bali to the Mekong to the Himalayas, along with sculpture and multimedia objects. The gallery is on the second floor of Squires Student Center, located on College Avenue in Blacksburg. The show opens July 25 and runs until August 31, 2008. There will be an artist's reception there on Friday, August 1st, at 6 p.m. During the summer, the gallery is open Tuesday-Thursday from 10 - 6, Friday 10 - 10, Saturday noon - 10 and Sunday noon - 6.

West also holds an open house every year on the 11th and 12th of October, so don't miss the opportunity to engage with some of the most interesting art around. West may be contacted at patwest@pemtel.net or 540-626-7647 for more information and directions.