Art has always been her passion. Though her mother died when she was an infant, one of the family stories told was how her father first saw her mother while she was doing charcoal drawings in the window of an art store. She doesn’ t know whether she loved that story so much that it planted the seed for her art career, or whether she was genetically predisposed for art in general, or both. But she remembers as a child drawing on the pages of a phone book so heavily that it became unusable.
She has a bachelor of art education from the University of Toledo, and two master’ s degrees( arts and fine arts) from Bowling Green State University, as well as studying at Portland State University, Kent State University, the University of Hawaii, and Penland School of Craft in North Carolina.
She taught art in public schools from 1973 to 2013, and has been a professional painter since 1973.
Her work is in the permanent museum collections of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama, the Indiana State Museum,
Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Eli Lilly Collections, and the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science. Recently three of her paintings were turned into huge mosaics on the walls of the IU Health hospital in Bloomington.
And her list of honors includes awards from the Hoosier Salon, Midwest National Abstract Painting, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Heartland Art show, Indiana Heritage Arts, and many others.
But teaching, both in Ohio and in Brown County, has been important.
“ Oftentimes, working with the kids stimulated me to think about things and go off in a different direction” with her own artwork, she said.
Patricia and her husband Gary Bartels own the recreational business Explore Brown County, have two children, Lance, a pilot with United Parcel Service, and Christopher, a dentist who owns Tipton Lakes Family Dentist in Columbus.
Patricia and Gary moved to Brown County in 1984 and began building log cabins on land originally owned by her father.
“ I knew when I was very young that I didn’ t belong in the city,” she said.
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