Patti Heid is a multi-media fine artist who has lived around the world and is currently based in Malibu in a house/studio she architecturally designed. She is renowned for her technical mastery and wildly creative imagery. Her solo exhibition “Airbrush to AI: Fifty Years of Reinvention: A Retrospective by Patti Heid” opens at Los Angeles Center for Digital Art on Thursday, December 4 with an artist’s reception from 6-9PM. The expansive show, which runs through December 27, aggregates five decades of Heid’s work, encompassing airbrush, digital imaging, collage, neon, installation, bead and sequin embellished works, and AI pieces – and various combinations thereof. Each is infused with a sense of magical realism, telling stories – many autobiographical – in a way that is both narrative and fantastical. The opening coincides with December’s DTLA ArtNight.
Throughout her body of work, Heid has transformed memory, trauma, and life’s myriad challenges into personal yet universal statements on love, loss, perseverance, and redemption. Her subject matter also leads with commentary on social, political, and environmental issues in times of societal upheaval. From her lush, luminous airbrushing of the 1970s to her pioneering digital imagery of the 1980s, and AI experiments during the Covid lockdown, the exhibition lyrically documents five decades of imaginative artistic evolution and technical innovation. Featuring rich layering and figurative representation against abstracted landscapes and backgrounds, each work rises phoenix-like, turning struggle into unexpected visions of beauty.
At the same time that she looks back with a retrospective timeline survey, moves ahead with a deep dive into AI, and a monumental new multi-media piece created for the show, “A Dear in the Headlights.” The site-specific installation lined with 32 12×12” semi-auto-biographical paintings. The piece also includes an AI film, crystal trees and two taxidermy deer – one is the mounted head of a stag, the other a fawn. She says, “My dad hunted him [for sport/food] when I was 3. He repeatedly told me ’the body was outside the house’ when I cried and I always believed it. This mounted sentinel has always been a touchstone, a final gift from my dad when he passed.”
A child of the heartland, Heid was raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she came to love art at a very early age. She says that, “Per my mom, my first word was ‘pencil,’ the second ‘paper.” Her father was a custom car painter, and she whiled away many hours of her childhood on his workbench, endlessly exploring color charts and meticulously airbrushing tone gradations while her dad detailed pinstripes and such on automobiles. At school, she won every lunch poster contest, and at age 10, a national art contest for Crispy Critters Cereal. The printing press she was awarded stoked her lifelong interest in using industrial art tools and techniques.
University in Milwaukee and a BFA followed, along with building her first loft inspiring a collective of artists to follow, and a job at an ad agency, where operating their large format darkroom inspired her interest in photorealism. While still attending university, she was accepted in the 1976 Bicentennial International show “American Painters in Paris.” She says, “This removed my fledgling art career doubts.” She showed around the Midwest, and several cash awards financed an extended solo hitchhiking excursion to see the museums of Europe.
Heid’s career took off in the late 1970s with her airbrush work while living in Los Angeles (where she also did album cover paintings to support her gallery work) and London where she also did covers, and started a band with Al Kooper called “The Raw Nuts”. They cut a record with George Harrison, Herbie Flowers and Ray Cooper, documented in the book “Beatles Fully Uncovered” by Kristofer Engelhardt.
The respiratory effects of airbrush painting forced her to curtail major use of it. She found a new medium, saying, “In 1986 I became a passionate self-taught digital artist. The genre was in its infancy. I obsessively honed my skills. A good friend who had become a computer mogul traded a state-of-the-art computer system for a large painting in his company lobby.” She is considered a pioneer in the field in the fine art world.
Heid lived in California for 24 years (including 5 years in San Francisco) until a personal crisis prompted a change. She relocated to San Miguel de Allende in 2011 to expose her two children to immersion in their Mexican heritage. There, she built her “La Chapella de la Suenos/The Chapel of Dreams” art studio and opened the Patti Heid Gallery.
She returned to California in 2018 after the massive Malibu Woolsey fire, floods, and mudslides devastated the area, including her art studio property. She shuttered her gallery in Mexico and came back with new resolve. She says, “I was given an initial basic beta version of an AI program that I have been enthusiastically merging with my airbrush skills.” In this medium, “A Dear in the Headlights” is leading the way for a new phase of this survivor’s leaving the past, towards new visions for this ever-expanding career. The creative chameleon says, “Airbrush to AI: Fifty Years of Reinvention: A Retrospective by Patti Heid” “chronicles my phoenix-like journey. Knock me down nine times, I’ll get up ten.”
Heid has exhibited in many notable shows and galleries. My painting show “Anti LA Olympic Art” was purchased in its entirety by Lou Adler and Jack Nicholson. “An Arc of Angels” for The Brendan Waltater Gallery in Santa Monica CA inspired visionary Timothy Leary to write an analysis that is featured on my site pattiheid.com. Renowned Chicago artist Ed Paschke wrote his official response to my paintings for the “Media Sedation” Catalogue. Geraldo Rivera also wrote for the catalogue, then purchased the entire Media Sedation show for his Investigative News Group lobby NYC. Ed Ruscha, master wordsmith, generously gave me the phrase “A Compucornicopia.” I also had multiple solo and group shows at The Patricia Correia Gallery Bergamot Station, Santa Monica CA and The Julie Rico Gallery, Santa Monica CA, The Walter Wickheiser Gallery, NY and The Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco. The art publications ‘Best of CA Artists’ and ‘The Encyclopedia of Living Artists 7” included my paintings. The first Fine Art digital billboard located on the Playboy building in Los Angeles featured my work and ABSOLUT VODKA, a prestigious art sponsor at the time, chose my art for their billboard on the Sunset Strip. An Art In America review by Garret Henry summary states, “Read as gigantic lyrical essays, Heid’s output is fantastic, funny and often phenomenal.”
