Pensacola artist Pat Page created the most amazing painting for me. Several months ago I sent her an old black-and-white photograph of my parents, Mary Jane and Robert L. Waters, enjoying the white sand on Pensacola Beach.
The original photo is probably from the late 1940s or early 1950s, before I was born. Pat Page took it and turned it into a work of art that now hangs on the walls of my house in Tallahassee. You see the final product here in the first two photos.
There was something star-crossed about Pat’s work for me. After the painting was finished, we realized that my mother taught her as a student at Navy Point Elementary School. My mother was a teacher there and also at Oakcrest Elementary over a teaching career of nearly 40 years.
My interest in Pat Page’s art work first began when I saw another painting she did of Hutson Hardware store in Pensacola. In my teen years, I spent a lot of time at this store with my old middle-school classmate Janet Waters, whose parents owned Hutson’s.
The Hutson Hardware painting was an amazing piece all by itself. One of Pat’s specialties is taking old historic photographs and turning them into paintings of artistic value.
Then I saw several Pat Page paintings when Jim and I visited Pensacola earlier this year and stopped by Quayside Art Gallery at Ferdinand Plaza in downtown Pensacola. There was a small stack of Pat’s business cards there. They piqued my interest.
So I grabbed a card and contacted her about creating the painting you see here. For the sake of comparison, I have also included the original photo that Pat turned into this beautiful piece of art.
I just contacted Pat again today to commission another painting using some of my old family photos. Jim and I can’t wait to see the final product!
Robert Craig Waters 