Tuëma Pattie (b. 1938) was born in Dublin and studied at the Belfast College of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and Morley College, London, Piers Ottey and Christopher Baker in Sussex and Robin Child in Devon.
Tuema has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the Royal Hibernian Summer Exhibition; the Cork Street Gallery; Art for Youth at the Mall Gallery London; London Art Fair; the Chichester Open; the Moncrief Bray Gallery, the Kevis House Gallery and the Rowntree Tryon Gallery all in Petworth; APPART; the East Hampshire Art Fair; the Jorgensen Gallery in Dublin and at Glyndebourne.
In October 2020 the Cynthia Corbett Gallery presented a major retrospective of Tuëma Pattie, entitled Tuëma Pattie Retrospective: From Conventional To Experimental at La Galleria in St. James's, London. The retrospective featured over 100 original paintings that were offered for sale for the first time in Pattie's career.
In her days in Belfast and London, she took advantage of urban scenes as her subject matter. She then had a long period in which she took time out to have two children and to support her husband in his career. This meant it was difficult to find the time for her beloved painting, as was the case for many women in that era.
With the move out of London in 1989, she did have the subsequent benefit of much foreign travel. Subject matter was carefully gathered with the resultant explosion of energy into her canvases, with paintings from the Galapagos, Antarctica, Spain, Italy and Uzbekistan as well as her beautiful West Sussex. It is from this period that she was able to develop into the world of experimental landscapes.
“To me, painting has always been an opportunity to interpret imaginatively what I see in front of me. The facts are there – it is how one brings them to life that is the magic”.