I met Patti by chance … it was my lucky day. I planned to have an encaustic workshop with Michelle Marcuse and because there were not enough people for the workshop she asked Patti to take us "into her custody” to teach us the encaustic technique.

I was dreaming about encaustics for very long time and, to be honest, a week before the workshop I've started to be anxious.

The class was a big boom. Patti was giving to us, step by step, a toy after another and another. Encaustic is a seductive technique because of its spatiality and the many options that it offers. You can paint with wax as you do with a regular paint, you can build or bury things on it to create texture and fantastic effects.

But above all, I want to talk about Patti and what I've learned from her. First about her studio... a space where you see that it's a place for work, for hard work. I saw two dozens of big drawing pads with multitude of drawing exercises. An additional room full of paintings and sculptures and I am not taking into account her entire house which is a mixture of art, antiques and corners with memories and humorous signs. This is Patti and her universe, the place where she transforms everything around her into pieces of art. All her living space is filled with diversity of paintings and photographs, and in this magic place, ordinary things become Art. A pipe turns out to be the spine and tail of a lizard; an old barrel is transformed into a sort of a canvas for painting women bodies. Even the big pipe over the house becomes a huge mosquito.

Her lessons were exactly what I needed. Working with wax is not easy and you need a place with good ventilation. Tools for melting the wax, the medium and, of course, the wax colors are also fundamental. As, for the moment, my studio is just improvised, all these materials would have been far from me. Patti settled her studio with all the above elements so everything worked perfectly. She provided us with everything that was needed for the workshop and also prepared a dossier with the workshop schedule and lots of useful information. Every day she thought us a new technique sharing with us all her knowledge about encaustic. As we were working she never left us alone, she was creating something along with us too. I admired from the beginning her courage and her disposition for experimenting with new things, to put in practice all her incredible and non-conventional ideas.

And finally, why I wrote about Patti? Because of her incredible heart, her kindness and her special way of being. Because nowadays it is hard to find authentic people, honest persons who are by themselves lessons of life.