Patti Trimble

I’m a Marin native, and have been a painter and poet most of my life, exhibiting paintings in galleries and museums and performing lyric poems in theaters, festivals, and other venues, often with music, sometimes with projected images.

My work has always touched on wild places and environmental issues, and these days my focus is entirely on climate change and the anthropocene.

I think by writing and painting, as wholistically as possible. In my poems, there has always been a freedom to bring themes and styles together. I have been painting a long time, and now I just want to think better about the world and our place in it. In the studio these days sticking to a single prescribed style feels way too limiting. I want wholistic images to appear, images that tell me something new: from gestural abstraction, to realism, science diagrams, words, intuitive and imaginative surprises, appropriation, automatism, surrealism. Poetry and painting are professions, and I have also worked as a National Park Naturalist; as studio assistant to first-generation abstract expressionists (for ten years in New York); as a science and literature writer; and as creative writing and visual art professor.