Patricia Gray: Canadian wilderness abstract artist and psychotherapist

'Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.' ~Joseph Campbell

the Artist & the Art

Albany River, James Bay

Patricia Gray is a self-trained, full-time artist with Mi’kmaq ancestry, who spent her childhood in the James Bay Region of Northern Ontario, Canada, in the land of the Mushkego Cree. Eventually, she went on to study healing and wholeness from a cross-cultural perspective, earning a Master’s Degree from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California. Her studies included the Nature of Consciousness; Creativity; Indigenous Wisdom and Ecology; Indigenous Approaches to Wellness; Shamanism; and Dreams and Archetypes. In addition to being an artist, Patricia is a Registered Psychotherapist and had a private practice for nearly 20 years, specializing in clinical traumatology. She has been recognized for her extensive work with victims of sexual assault/abuse and other violent crimes as well as with First Nations' people including Residential School Survivors and their families.

Patricia recognizes the immense healing power of nature and its ability to help us reconnect with our own True Nature. As an artist, she has worked in both porcelain and acrylic mediums as a way of processing and expressing her many and varied cultural and wilderness experiences. She paints on 'gallery style' wood panels using a wide array of acrylic paints, gels, pastes, and grounds, to create enchanting relief, designs, and highly textured surfaces that engage the viewer. Patricia spends much of her time hiking, camping, kayaking, canoe tripping, and snowshoeing with her Anishinaabe artist husband, Mark Nadjiwan, in the inspiriting wilderness regions of Temagami, Lake Superior, and Georgian Bay.

Autumn paddle on beautiful Georgian Bay

Artist Statement

"Visual art, like music, is a unique form of communication in that it provides a ‘vocabulary’ to articulate the musings of the soul. Recognizing the immense healing power of the natural world and its ability to reconnect us with our own True Nature, I hope that my wilderness paintings might somehow act as a portal of transformation for others, and communicate how imperative it is that we seek out our own ‘sacred spaces.’ Those places that can support and foster the exploration of the more subtle realms of our spiritual nature, in an effort to discover the truth about who and what we are -- and deepen our understanding of how everything in the manifested world is truly the One Great Mystery revealing itself in form."