Patch Kientz, a senior at Yosemite High, has two career goals: He wants to be a theoretical physicist and he wants to be an artist.

Area residents will have an opportunity to see his art work during Sierra Art Trails Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 23 and 24, during an open studio tour in Eastern Madera County and Mariposa County. Studios and galleries participating in Art Trails will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. those two days.

Kientz will be showing his work at Stavast Studio Gallery on Highway 41 in Oakhurst.
He says his work has “a lot of variety” and much of it is abstract impressionistic. Oils and enamel paint are his favorite media but he also does charcoal drawings and pastels.
Kientz has just finished a painting on the walls of the Badger Art Gallery at YHS.
He says he has always had a real interest in art and his been inspired by Van Gogh since he was about 12. Art has come naturally to him, he says. Most of his painting is done in his two art classes at YHS.

Speaking about his art style, he says “I like to express the theme in my paintings of randomness and chaos resulting in an organized state.”

He calls himself a philosophical painter, meaning that he has a philosophy to back up what he does.

He says he uses a lot of motifs such as pigeons and a figure he has created called the “great observer” to represent how random occurrences such as Darwinian evolution and, in theory, the “big bang” result in an organized nature.

“Organization is a continuing process such as the way in which a star collapses into a black hole,” he explains.

Kientz says he has enjoyed his art classes at YHS “very much” and he adds that art teachers Rivka Schaffner and Diane Bopp “have been major inspirations. I’ve learned a lot from them about art history and art techniques.” This year, his YHS art teacher is Carol Hendrickson, who is new to the art staff.

He had a show at Timberline Gallery last year and sold four pieces. “It is a thrill” to have people buy his work, he says. He will have a one-man show at the Badger Gallery this year.

Shaffner, who was Kientz’s art teacher when he was a freshman, says he is “one of the most advanced art students to ever cross my path as an art educator.”
She said with each assignment he completed, it became “more and more apparent that I had an artistic genius on my hands. I felt like I was training a future Picasso .. he did not see it yet.”

Shaffner goes on to say “I look up to him as an inspiration for my own art. I consider him an equal in my field of painting. I am humbled in his great shadows.”
She concludes by noting that Kientz’ “potential as an artist will be recognized by the art critics sooner than we think.”