Artist Pat Biggs in her studio which was formally a greenhouse. The studio has view of the garden – one of Biggs’ other loves.
Ryan lely/Sonoma Valley Sun
Now that it’s spring, clay and mixed media artist Pat Biggs is torn – between her studio and her garden. But she does work in the studio every day, with her clay masks and other art on the walls, and the found objects she incorporates in her work arranged in orderly groups on the floor. “I love to garden, to put my hands in the soil, as well as in clay,” she said.
Her work has evolved since she started making functional pottery as a student at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, and has always had clay and a potter’s wheel at hand, even when she had to do other work to support her family.
After a visit to Sonoma in 1973, the third-generation Californian sold her house in Santa Clara and in a month moved her family to a house on Broadway. “I like being in a small community in the country,” she said. She started her own business, grooming dogs in The Groom Room, originally located on Highway 12 in the Springs, then at her present spot on Eighth Street East, until 1979. Now she works halftime, running the office of Biggs Electric, a contracting firm owned by her husband, Eric.
In the early ’80s, Biggs decided she needed a change in her art and started making masks. “I’ve always been fascinated with faces and bodies because they’re so individual and different,” she said. She notes that people aren’t perfect and that it’s the imperfections she likes.
The masks evolved into more three-dimensional pieces with bodies, which Biggs started showing exclusively at Bartholomew Park Winery. In the late ’80s, Gundlach Bundschu began running the winery and her friends Nancy and Jim Bundschu invited Biggs to display her work in the tasting room.
Biggs always starts with clay. First, she makes and fires a kiln-full of clay body parts – heads, torsos, arms and hands – at low temperature so they’ll absorb paint and other coloring she applies later.
Then Biggs, who works intuitively, starts combining clay pieces with objects she and others find, such as driftwood and pieces of metal. Then she colors the clay using oil and acrylic paint, and stain.
Recently, when tearing down a shed on her property, Biggs found a piece of concrete with a green Barbie doll high-heel shoe that had belonged to her daughter Cortney, now 26, embedded in it. Biggs used the piece of concrete as a head, attached it to a clay woman’s body, then mounted it on a metal base that included the other green shoe she found later.
“I like to try new things all the time,” Biggs says. She’s been experimenting with encaustic – heated wax with added pigment – because she can polish the surface, which gives it depth, and can embed objects like pieces of fabric. “It’s almost a three-dimensional medium.”
She exhibits her work at the Arts Guild of Sonoma gallery on East Napa Street, selling a few pieces a year for $1,000 each, and participates in the ARTrails open studios program run by the Arts Council of Sonoma County.
Pat Biggs, 198115 8th St. E., Sonoma; 707.938.3787; e-mail pbiggs@vom.com.
