SWITCHBACKS // COMMUNION: THE SOUL'S JOURNEY
Sacred Memories
Patricia Moss-Vreeland and the intersection of art, memory, grief, and hope
by Elaine Crivelli
EXCERPT //
Inside the childhood home in Manhattan where she lived with her mother, father, and sister, multimedia artist Patricia Moss-Vreeland remembers learning to draw with her mother, at first to improve her skill by copying accurately from pictures but eventually to open the young artist to the entire visual language of art. “My mother was my first mentor and inspired my passion, love, and curiosity about art from a very early age. I would watch her draw and was mesmerized,” she told me in one of our many conversations. “When I was only four years old, she put the pencil in my hand, found that I could draw, and that changed my life.”
She and her mother often visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, roaming the rooms and talking about the art that moved them. Moss-Vreeland discovered the work of Vermeer while her mother was captivated by the brushwork of Rembrandt. After attending art school at Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts, Moss-Vreeland settled in Philadelphia with her husband to begin their professional careers as artists.
When she was 25, she received the news that her mother was ill with cancer. The last thing they did together before her mother was hospitalized was spend time again at the museum. Shortly after, her mother died and it was a devastating loss.
Forty-five years later, on a recent trip to the museum, Moss-Vreeland recalled the power of memory and place as she walked through the museum rooms and felt her mother’s presence. Over the years, the intersection of art, memory, grief, and hope became where she lived as an artist. //
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