Pat Dagnon
De Soto, Wisconsin

Pat Dagnon began drawing at an early age, beginning with horses and Indians. Later she filled the margins of her schoolbooks with pencil drawings of people, plants, and animals.

Born in Milwaukee and raised in the small town of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, she lived amid fields, woods, lakes and rivers and developed a lasting appreciation for the natural world, working to capture the beauty of the environment surrounding her.

Dagnon took some drawing classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but she’s mostly a self-taught artist. Going to museums and art shows and studying art books became major influences for her work, and the outdoors always had more appeal than the classroom.

She works in pastel, which provides the same intense color and subtle nuances as oil paint and can be worked into an impasto similar to oils without the fumes of oil paint and solvents.

Dagnon works on archival sanded pastel paper and uses Unison pastels handmade in England. They contain mostly pure pigment with only a small amount of binder to hold the pastel stick together, giving them a rich and highly pigmented color. She begins by toning the paper to a dark value and working the image in with lighter, more subdued colors and small highlights to show a focal point. She uses her fingers to softly blend the colors and shapes to achieve a soft focus but leaving a recognizable image.

Dagnon and her husband David Spangler built a home outside of Viroqua, Wisconsin, in 1976, in an open valley surrounded by streams, springs and stands of hardwoods, inspirations for many of her early works.  Ten years later they relocated to the Texas Panhandle where Spangler worked in the Conservation Center of the Panhandle -Plains Historical Museum.

The Panhandle, with its expansive vistas of open rangeland and prairies beyond, offered inspiration for her new work in oil and pastel.  And a move to Colorado six years later allowed her to explore the beauty and the endless subject matter of the high peaks and mountain meadows of Rocky Mountain National Park, as well as the canyons of Utah and high deserts of New Mexico. 

Dagnon rarely traveled without her camera, as is her habit even today, and on each trip she photographed the landscapes that caught her eye, as well as horses owned by friends. She wanted to “portray their beauty, wild strength and grace in a straightforward honesty that best captured their spirit.”

Changing media was part of her ongoing education in the visual arts and she made a series of ink drawings, as well as brush and sumi ink paintings of running, bucking and frolicking horses. She also learned the technique of solar etching, using the sun as an etching agent and other ‘green’ materials such as water to fix the etched plate

A new series of paintings evolved from summer trips back to Wisconsin. Staying along the banks of the Mississippi River and canoeing the backwaters at dusk and dawn inspired serene riverscapes. "Her work from this period is reminiscent of the American Tonalists."

“I find that the joy I get from the natural world disappears quickly in the routine of everyday life,” she says, “and that is why I try to preserve the experiences in my art. Showing my work to others is a way of communication, sending out a message saying, ‘You’ve got to see what I saw today - here, look at what’s out there.’ ”

Dagnon is now trying digital photography along with her pastels. It allows her to crop and manipulate photos to produce results similar to those achieved in pastels and drawings. She prints the digital images on bamboo or cotton fiber paper with stable, pigment-based inks.

Her work has been exhibited in Wisconsin as well as in galleries in Amarillo, Texas; Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico; and Colorado Springs and Denver, Colorado. Since moving to Wisconsin, she has shown her works in Iowa, Winona, Minnesota and, beginning in 2009, at the Driftless Area Art Festival in Soldiers Grove. One of her pastels, “Fall Migration,” was selected as the poster for the 2010 festival.

Pat Dagnon, artist
pdagnon@mwt.net

Text by Sharon Murphy
Photos courtesy of Pat Dagnon