Artist – Patricia Dombecki Bio:

I’ve been an artist all my life and can pinpoint it down to when I was four years old and received my first paint set to play with.  My interest in art continued from there until I completed my degree in Fine Art from Wayne State University.  I worked as an art teacher for community ed, alternative ed, home school and nursing home programs.

Painting the Gilully family interested me because of the numerous Civil War battlefields I visited and plein air painted in.  I’ve had a lot of research into that era already as I had visited the Ann Arbor Historical Society museum’s show on Victorian mourning customs and incorporated what I learned there into my Gilully family painting.  The family is two years post death of their beloved husband and father and into a “light mourning” phase.

I found a Civil War era painting of two women in mourning to give me some body placements then I sketched them to reflect my people. I completed four sketches until I had the positioning and size correct.  I enlarged this sketch onto a canvas and began to paint them with acrylic, my usual medium.  Since my grandmother-in-law lived in Brighton in the 1920’s, I tried to utilize her face and her daughters’ faces to be my Gilully women since there presumably are not photos of these people. Adjustments to expressions and colors, and repositioning took place before I was pleased with the portrait.  Included is a quick painted sketch of their husband/father, Col. John Gilully.