Longtime Mill Valley resident Patricia Gwilliam Ziegler, who created the gorgeous back page of the 2024-25 Enjoy Mill Valley Guide, is the Mill Valley Chamber‘s selection as Artist of the month for October!
The First Tuesday Artwalk is set for Tuesday, Oct. 1st from 5:30pm-7:30pm.
To Patricia Gwilliam Ziegler, painting is her lifelong personal journal, a visual expression of her relationships and experiences, interpretations of memories that linger in her heart beyond words. Family, parenting, marriage, as well as the simple moments of every day are her inspirations. To Ziegler the act of painting is like vivid dreaming. She starts with a color or a vague memory and follows her brush as it reveals the image, developing into an enchanted vision with a life of its own.
Influenced at an early age by the intimate homelife paintings of Édouard Vuillard as well as the expressive sense of color, composition, and pattern of Gaugin, she gravitated towards figurative painting.
After majoring in art at UCSB, she returned to the Bay Area to study under the mentorship of Joan Brown. These years reinforced her fascination with personal figurative imagery, pattern, and color.
She also began illustrating on the side and was hired as chief editorial illustrator and courtroom artist of the San Francisco Chronicle and Time Magazine. Her entrepreneurial nature along with her illustration and design skills led to her co-founding with her husband several companies over the years, including Banana Republic, Republic of Tea, and Zoza. This allowed her to paint privately and freely.
Over the years she has experimented with different techniques and mediums but has always returned to oil on canvas or linen, lately with the addition of a wax medium. Her subjects reveal themselves to her as she paints and have lately evolved from mostly figurative to landscape, reflecting her deep reverence for nature.
Now in her eighth decade she is just letting her paintings out to public view.
First Tuesday ArtWalk is next Tuesday, October 1st from 5:30-7:30. The title of her show is Breathing and her medium is acrylic and wax on canvas and linen.
Aside from the First Tuesday Artwalk, the Chamber’s office is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 12-4pm.