Tobacco-Forrester - "Rose Reprise" Realistic watercolor of red rose bush branches

Patricia Tobacco Forrester • American (1940-2014)

Rose Reprise • Watercolor on Paper 39-1/2" x 60"

Patricia Tobacco Forrester married well, but it didn’t stop her from becoming a successful artist. A farm girl from western Massachusetts, she attended college in her hometown. As luck would have it, Smith College, was known for turning out well-mannered, independent, world leaders. Think, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Julia Child, and more. Young Patricia fit right in. She studied printmaking and sculpture with the well-known modernist, Leonard Baskin. Soon she was at Yale studying with Chuck Close and Janet Fish, two of the leading Photo-Realists of the day. She earned a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts. She was a woman on the move who fell in love with a dashing professor of psychology after discarding a first husband named Forrester. The artist and the psychiatrist settled beside the San Francisco Bay.

Her second husband, Paul Ekman, became the world’s most famous psychiatric thinker since Sigmund Freud. Unconvinced by the powers of Freud’s psychotherapy, Ekman believed facial expressions provided a truer path to a persons innermost workings. He spent years studying people in different cultures to decipher a universal language of emotions. Eventually he was named one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People” by Time Magazine. In the meantime, his wife, Patricia Tobacco Forrester accompanied him on trips to southeast Asia and Pacific Islands where she regularly trekked deep into the native forests to paint her over-sized watercolor landscapes. She was a well-known and respected artist, but never became as successful as he.

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The marriage didn’t last, but Forrester’s art career flourished as her lush giant landscapes appeared in prominent galleries and museums from the aristocratic British Museum to the Art Institute of Chicago. Eventually her fascination with lush tropical landscapes proved her undoing as an illness contracted on a trip to Costa Rica eventually sapped her remaining strength.

This vibrant artist spent her life looking for ways to portray what Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” She worked in watercolors because she cherished the surprises it brought as pigments followed rivulets of water across the paper. She described her art simply: “I paint things that grow.” Some of these things have grown their way into Stark County history at the Canton Museum of Art. Come visit and enjoy an ARTe week.

Canton Museum of Art Permanent Collection • Gift of Dr. Leon & Barbara Rosenberg, 2009.3

4 Ways to Sound Smart When Viewing at The Canton Museum of Art

1.
“Her second husband, Paul Ekman, was famous for discovering how facial expressions exposed peoples’ lies. I’d sure like to know why they got divorced.”

2.
“Artist’s Magazine once said ‘Nothing she did was trivial or tidy. She worked and lived big’. Or as I always say, ‘go big or go home’.”

3.
“She almost always painted on giant sheets of paper as she sat on the ground without an easel. It gave many of her paintings a rather oddly skewed tilt.”

4.
“She once said that she really didn’t paint plants, but rather she painted ‘things that grow’ Words are overrated.”

Tobacco Forrester Timeline. Scroll over images to see timeline.

1940

Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, to a farming family whose immigrant name, Tobczynski, was changed to Tobacco when her grandfather entered America through Ellis Island. She grew up in Hatfield, Massachusetts, where her family raised asparagus, cucumbers and, yes, tobacco. Her closeness to nature during childhood had a strong effect on her mature art, since she always painted lush plants and landscapes.

1962

Graduated from Smith College in her hometown of Northampton Massachusetts. She studied art with Leonard Baskin, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and was Phi Beta Kappa. In other words, she was one smart cookie. She then journeyed to Yale University for further art training.

1962-65

Studied at Yale with famed photo-realists Chuck Close and Janet Fish (ARTe: Sept., 2017). She also studied with Neil Welliver. Welliver was a painter of large landscapes with whom Forrester’s creative instincts were most in tune. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1963 and Master of Fine Arts degree in 1965

1967

Received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts. By this time she was married to Alex Forrester about whom little is known. They divorced in the late 1960s. Beginning in the mid-60s she lived in San Francisco, first with Forrester and then with second husband, Paul Ekman.

Early 1970s

Married Paul Ekman, famed psychologist, whose study of micro-expressions made him one of Time Magazines “100 Most Influential People,” in 2009. Forrester accompanied Ekman on research trips to Hawaii, southeast Asia and Micronesia. While he conducted research on facial expressions across cultures, she trekked into the forests to paint indigenous plant life.

1971

Taught at Chabot Junior College in Hayward, California. From 1972-1981 she taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Sometime in the late 1970s, she divorced Paul Ekman.

1981

Divorced from Paul Ekman, she left San Francisco, taking a rapid-fire series of teaching positions. First at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, and then the University of Iowa in Iowa City. By 1982 she was teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago.

1982

Moved to Washington D.C. where she quickly became a central player in the area arts scene. During this time she made frequent painting trips to the National Botanical Gardens where she “knew just about every plant.” This was her home for the remainder of her life.

1984

Taught at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art.

1992

Elected an Associate in the prestigious National Academy of Design and became an Academician in 1994.

2011

Died at her home in Washington, D.C. She was in difficult health for a number of years due to a disease she contracted while trekking through the forests of Costa Rica to paint landscapes. Today her paintings are in the National Collection of Fine Arts, the White House, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum of Art, British Museum, and the Canton Museum of Art.