Palomar Show Boldly Celebrates Life : Art: Patricia Patterson’s looks at the daily challenges faced by humankind are both intimate and monumental. And they remain profoundly easy to enjoy.

SAN DIEGO —  The term larger than life has no bearing on the work of Patricia Patterson. However large her paintings or all-embracing her installations, her work marvels over a simple fact: there is nothing larger than life. Life itself densely fills every known crevice, it overwhelms every surface, it defines every sound, smell and sight.

Patterson’s new work at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery (1140 W. Mission Road, San Marcos, through March 6) launches from this premise into a three-dimensional exposition of her own life that is personal, but not particularly private. Its images are overtly autobiographical, but feel more like casual snapshots than diary entries.

In the installations--and especially the paintings--in the show titled “Bed Ground Dog Table,” the most familiar of life’s fixtures are isolated, intensified, made vibrant and luminous.

Patterson’s work is accessible and profoundly easy to enjoy as it volleys back and forth between feeling modest in scope and, at the same time, monumental.

But this duality in the work triggers the same problematic, existential questions as life itself: Is there a larger meaning or purpose to all of this? Or is it enough simply to savor the colors, textures and other surface sensations? Patterson’s work shies away from answering the former, but to the latter it replies with a resounding yes.

Patterson’s show is divided into three sections. All three spur waves of associations, but the installation titled “The Nest” does so with the simplest of means.

Here, the artist, who teaches at UC San Diego, has built a room within a room, a basic white rectangle with yellow trim on the windows and door, and a blue floor. The sole piece of furniture within is a bed with a red metal frame. An artist’s notebook and colored pens have been set down casually on the bedspread, as if freshly abandoned.

Like a bird’s nest, Patterson’s room is a refuge, a place of security, comfort and creation. That the artist’s materials rest on the bed--rather than on a table or easel--tightens the knot that Patterson has established here between her domestic life and her art.

Although her paintings of the last few years have tenderly evoked the patterns and practices of her friends on Ireland’s Aran Islands, Patterson’s new work focuses on her own life, home and family.

In “The Nest,” as well as the other two installations here, Patterson literally opens the door to her everyday life and thoughts.

Green French doors part to reveal “Everyday Theatre,” an installation of seven large paintings (8 to 12 feet wide) and two garden beds with straw-topped rows of dirt and chicken-wire fencing.

Several of the paintings here also feature gardens--one glowing with golden sunflowers in June, another dark and tame in November. Patterson’s palette of cool mint green, rich coral, warm gold and soft blue delivers a retinal buzz that, together with the paintings’ large scale and equally vivid frames, gives the scenes an immediacy and vibrancy that is consistently seductive.

In her previous paintings, the intensity of Patterson’s colors seemed linked to the exoticism of Aran Islands life. Here, the pitch is just as high, though the scenes are familiar: the artist’s husband and another man eating at a patio table; the family dogs, eager to play; a grave, marked with wreaths; a bed with a cross hanging around one post and a chamber pot beneath; a woman, pensive in the kitchen.

The paintings erase the possibility of banality by lending the most ordinary of sights a richness and transcendence. They fuel a refreshing sense of discovery.

This regeneration of the senses parallels the life-bestowing act of gardening that is so frequently the object of Patterson’s attention.

The third installation in the show, “Objects/Words,” is the only one that fails to pervade its space with this air of sensory celebration. Here, the mint-colored walls are covered with words describing colors, everyday activities and the names of plants. In the middle of the room sits a picnic table set for dining.

Entering through blue screen doors, the occupant of this room experiences neither the overwhelming immediacy of “Everyday Theatre” nor the quiet resonance of “The Nest.” Instead, the words on the walls shift the focus from being to thinking about being, from seeing and feeling to naming. The room is colorful but static.

Gallery director Louise Kirtland-Boehm and her students have produced an elegant brochure to accompany the show, and Patterson’s statement within helps clarify her intent.

Each of the basic components of daily life--bed, dog, ground, table--”is a realm of discovery,” she writes. “Each opens up a terrain, a territory. . . . This exhibit is about an embrace of the transitory, the perishable, the imperfect, the fugitive, the unremarked.”

Patterson’s contribution to the genre tradition carries no moral weight of its own, but, in its reiteration of life, it echoes life’s own challenges. It raises questions of meaning that are as universal as they are personal, questions that are old but never stale. Her work--like life--is as rewarding as the appetites and attitudes brought to it.