Face to Face

Libbie Patterson finds creative freedom painting whimsical portraits of pets and young people.

Written by Eugene Stockstill  |  Photos by Joe Worthem

Oxford painter Libbie Kakales Patterson’s family history is filled with the sort of images that would make a poet weep. So, it seems to make perfect sense that she would spend her days in an art studio making blank canvases come to life.

George Kakales, once a shepherd in the mountains of Greece, left the old country with his wife, Toula, and young son, John, on board the Christopher Columbus bound for America in 1969, and they literally washed onto the United States’ shores under the Statue of Liberty’s shadow. Sister Libbie arrived the next year in St. Louis. By 1972, the family relocated to Oxford.

Longtime Oxonians will remember Dino’s, the downtown pizzeria owned and operated by the Kakales family. The restaurant location gave coloring-like-mad Libbie her first art show at a very young age, courtesy of the businesses on either side of Dino’s.

“They gave me their gift boxes (to embellish),” Patterson said. “They would display them in their windows.”

Patterson the collegian minored in art at Ole Miss, under the tutelage of the legendary Jere Allen, who painted two portraits of Patterson that hang in her house to this day.

“He really influenced me,” she said. “The bright, bold colors, the looseness of style. He used to say, ‘Paint like you sign your name on a check.’”

In her first year of law school, Patterson felt like she had made a huge mistake, but when she told her father she wanted to drop out and study art, he refused to allow it. Patterson did wind up working for a Nashville law firm that represented Brooks and Dunn and Tim McGraw.

It was only after she’d married, had two sons and found her way back to Oxford that Patterson began creating art again, by way of all the photos she took of her children.

“Photography became my art form,” she said.

But it also inspired her to start painting again, because she wanted painted portraits of her sons and couldn’t find what she wanted. So, she wound up doing it herself. Then she called up a few friends, including Nicole Akins Boyd, who is a state senator, painted their portraits for free and then posted them on Facebook and Instagram, as did her two buddies.

“Within 48 hours, I had 24 commissions,” she said.

The vast majority of Patterson’s work, available via Instagram @libbiekp, includes ebullient, color-filled portraits of cheerful kids, spaniels and retrievers and poodles, including those of her sons and the family’s dog, Dodger.

Patterson attributes her affinity for portraits to those earlier days of photographing her family.

“Because I was taking so many photographs of my sons, it became a study in portraiture,” she said.

Patterson’s happy style, comes from deep within her, influenced not only by her college instructor Allen but also by the pop art genre epitomized by the famous Andy Warhol. She creates upstairs at her house, in a sun-kissed studio she calls “my happy place,” which includes a huge circular window overlooking a picturesque neighborhood.

How does Patterson work? She starts with a photograph that she shoots and prints, and then she begins to paint. She starts with a subject’s eyes and works her way to the edges of a canvas.

“You see their souls,” she said. “If the eyes are wrong, the whole painting is wrong.”

Patterson’s work has been featured at the Double Decker Arts Festival more than once. She recently conducted a well-received workshop on pet portraits, too, and is planning at least one or two more this fall.

If you are interested in her work, contact at libbekp@yahoo.com or visit her on Instagram @libbiekp.

Graffiti Art for the Soul

When Libbie Patterson’s father was diagnosed with cancer back in January 2020 during the COVID pandemic, something called graffiti art became her therapy.

Graffiti art is the aerosol equivalent of finger painting and sometimes takes the general approach to art that made Jackson Pollack a household name.

A rainbow dragon. A fluorescent BBQ pit. Hot pink chickens. You don’t have to worry about the rule book because there is not much of a rule book. You grab some cans of spray paint, maybe a few stencils, and you go to town on a canvas, creating whatever in the world your heart desires.

During the pandemic, “People were not going to buy art,” she said. “I needed to create; I needed to get out of the hospital.”

This was a deeply personal endeavor for Patterson. In fact, to this day, Patterson has only sold one piece of her graffiti art. The piece explodes with random colors but also has blackness along the edges. That periphery of darkness stands for the cancer of her father, who died in July of 2020.

In her studio, though, Patterson displays a bunch of groovy looking graffiti pieces on small hand-sized tabletop canvases. A dragonfly, a butterfly, a bumblebee and lovely sprays of color. Simple creative expressions that freed her soul.