PROFILE

Pat Cranor is a California native now residing in the San Diego area. He stills remembers the day he knew he wanted to become an artist. It just so happens to be the same day he won his first award in art.
Riding an athletic scholarship to college, Pat turned more toward commercial graphic design. Graduating from Idaho State University with a degree in Business Marketing and a minor in Art, he niftily linked the two disciplines together, moved back to Southern California and began a successful career as an advertising agency art director.
When his computer executive wife took a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity in Europe, Pat went along and offered his services as a freelance graphic designer to various ad agencies in Belgium and Holland.
In 1987, Pat and his wife switched continents yet again, this time moving to Japan. There it wasn't long before Pat began painting the striking, colorful and culture-clashing scenes he saw all around. Living in Osaka and Kobe for more than five years, Pat developed a particular admiration for the wood block prints of the Edo period. He was so influenced that he even developed his own similar style of brushing layer upon layer of brilliantly vivid textured watercolors evocative of the Japanese wood block print technique.
His early efforts in this style take a whimsically sardonic "foreigner's" point of view of a Japan rooted in tradition wrestling with the advancement of Western technology. After his first son was born, Pat painted a series of animals designed for his son's nursery. Child-development experts suggested that bright colors and repeated images were beneficial to a baby's development, so Pat applied this knowledge by developing a style of taking one image, repeating it, and putting it into the composition.
After returning to the United States, Pat took his warm and humorous "animals" to the streets and into the greeting card market. His illustrated cards can be found in gallery and gift shops across the country, from the Smithsonian in Washington D. C., and the United Nations Center in New York to the San Diego Zoo and the Long Beach aquarium, as well as many other stores and boutiques.
With the turn of the century Pat took a 180 degree turn and started his latest endeavor of mixed media on wooden tiles.

Pat's paintings are an expression of his unique style of combining bold colors with shapes from nature and geometric patterns. Each piece is an original, and one-of-a-kind. He uses acrylic and metallic paints on square hand-painted wooden tiles, grouped, and mounted on a frameless beveled edged wood panel to form a finished work of art.
The multi-step process begins by arranging different groups of brush painted wooden squares into a pattern, divided and spaced, to look like a chessboard. Next, he uses a pouring process of multiple colors, similar to the work of Jackson Pollack. Then, handmade templates are airbrushed and outlined. These steps are repeated again and again until a finished piece of art is achieved.
Pat's subject matter originates from his love of color, great sense of composition, and strong graphic design background. Each piece is created in a continual process from start to finish. The ideas for choice of color and design of patterns evolve as he paints. For Pat, color is always the primary focus.