If you remember a tiny watercolor landscape among the award winners in last August’s edition of “’Scapes,” you recognized that artist’s work in “Art NOW.” An artist working exclusively in watercolors and miniature format, Pamela Patrick won the Sid Platt Watercolor Award this month for From a Distance, a marshy view of New Jersey not far from the landscape in ’Scapes.

What keeps you coming back to miniatures?
Pamela Patrick: I tend to see ALL the details! Working in miniature releases me from “sweating the details,” since the size forces me to take in the whole scene. I can then return to the scene, so to speak, and fill in to my heart’s content without overworking the piece. I never get lost. It’s quite intimate.

Do you remember when and why you decided that it was going to be miniatures from here on out?
I was invited to exhibit my work at the Ratner museum in Bethesda. I was a new exhibitor at the Miniature Painters, Sculptors & Gravers Society show at the Strathmore. The curator at the Ratner felt that my work was very good and set a date three years ahead for my exhibit. Of course, I was energized and began using class studies to interpret into small form. That was six years ago. It’s a world wide group of artists that create fabulous art in miniature.

Where is the scene in From a Distance and what made you want to paint it?
From a Distance is from six or seven photos that I took along the Garden State Parkway near Ocean City/Avalon. We have a summer home in Cape May and Foggy Outlook (Aug 2013 award) was several shots along Sunset Blvd, one of the nation’s best bird sanctuaries, in Cape May. In From a Distance, the water tower in the distance is in Avalon, north of the cape. The marshes fill the landscape from the parkway to the islands that comprise the Jersey Shore. It’s a lonely space full of wildlife, rushes, stunted trees and salt marsh, but it means the beach is ahead! I grew up spending the summer at the cape and I love the history and the mystery of the place.