About

I deplore labels, both in Christianity and outside of it.  I guess if you “must” give me a label I am a Pentecostal, but you will find on these pages art from many Christian disciplines, as well as secular art.  If I come across something useful and instructive about art generally, that furthers our understanding and does not compromise my principles, I will add it here.

Peace – Patricia.

I was born in the UK and attended church and Sunday school like most other kids.   We moved to Africa and a few years later to New Zealand while I was in in my teens, and church attendance stopped at that point.   I had wanted to do art, but my family insisted on a ‘proper job’, so I worked hard and went to University.

After I qualified, I practised law in government in Wellington, tramping the high country of Central NZ at weekends and holidays to keep my sanity, and creating, exhibiting and selling art in my spare time.

I  revelled in the great New Zealand outdoors, and I was always conscious of the presence of The Creator there.  People say they sense this in the power of my landscapes, which you can check out at my Wilderness Art sites:

Wild New Zealand

Patricia Howitt Art

So there I was, nominally a Christian, albeit a lukewarm one.  In my spare time, I studied and read a lot about art, as well as practising it – but Christian art had no great impact on me.  I shunned churches and preferred to do my “worshipping” away from buildings, deep in the bush or better still on the tops, looking out over mountains and rolling hills with as little evidence of civilization as possible.

My favorite artists were – and still are – landscape painters.  But it did strike me how many of them were also Christians and painted openly Christian works.  Not that I made a great deal of that at the time.

Well, time marches on and our perspectives change – usually through adversity.  I lost my dad to leukaemia,  and gave up a good job to move to the country, stepping into his shoes on a 10 acre lifestyle block in an area of New Zealand that one might euphemistically call “economically depressed”.   There was a big house that my folks had been half way through building when my dad got sick five years earlier  He said we would have to sell it after he died. Well, we hired a builder and got the house pretty much finished so we could live here – but that’s another story.

Then, my mom was overtaken by Alzheimers.  I’d started a small graphic design and desktop publishing business in our nearest small town, but that became impossible.  For the next 10 years I looked after her sole charge, until she passed away early in 2007.  There were some dark times in those years, but thankfully I had the Internet. I was also blessed in that about 6 months before my mom died I was invited by some friends to attend a service at their small church on the coast north of here, and by the time that day closed, I had been baptized in the chilly October waters of the South Pacific.

It’s hard for me to express what a change that has made – and even harder to contemplate where I would be at now, had the Lord not put Himself back into my life.  And now I look at Christian art with a different appreciation, while at the same time realizing, as many of us do, that all my past experiences have led me to where I am now.

This blog is going to be a journey of exploration.  I don’t know quite where it will lead to but it is something important that I need to do, for myself, for my own art, and for the Lord’s work.

Patricia