Patricia Ariel is a contemporary Brazilian-American artist based in the Pacific Northwest. Although part self-taught, she had some formal instruction in visual arts that included classic drawing training and graphic and fashion design. Besides drawing and painting, Patricia has expressed herself since early age through different artistic languages like theater, dance, and music. Her decision to become a professional fine artist came only later, after leaving her homeland. Patricia’s art is strongly influenced by her spirituality and insights about the connections of men with nature and magic, and the spiritual/psychic dimensions. In her paintings of haunting and mysterious figures, she evokes her own experiences with loneliness, isolation, and inadequacy, as well as escapism and the search for transcendence from the material reality. Merging the human figure to patterns, expressionistic abstracts, and esoteric symbolism, she uses a realistic representation of the human figure in an attempt to blend reality with the immaterial, creating a world of visual poetry where light and darkness collide and reveal the symbolic and the mystical.