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North Ranch artist becomes enchanted by elephants
For artist Patricia Mason Sica, the majestic African elephant has become her muse. Her intricate drawings of the endangered creature mix realism with poignant detail. In her hands: bull elephants flap their huge ears and kick up clouds of dust in alarming defiance; a weary-looking elderly female elephant treads her withered body across a graveyard of tusks. In another drawing, a herd of elephants looks into the horizon and possibly toward extinction. "Elephant society is what we’d hope human society would be and isn’t," said Sica, a resident of North Ranch. "They don’t kill their own kind. They are supportive of one another. They are protective, nurturing and intelligent." Moreover, "They always remember where their friend was lost and every time they go by that spot, they kick up the dust looking for the bones. When they happen across an orphaned elephant, they welcome it into their family." Sica was born in Alhambra, has enormous hazel eyes and delicate features. She says she gets so caught up in her activities that she sometimes has to be reminded to eat. Lately, she appears thin. As a child, she loved horses and drawing. She liked to ride horses, too. Sica drew Arabian horses and imagined herself as a cowgirl, which she mispronounced "gowgirl." (It became an odd but affectionate nickname.) Although artistically inclined, Sica never lost touch with her left-brain functions. While still a teenager, she worked at Pacific Bell Telephone Company in the Bay Area, first in accounting then in computer systems. She ran the company’s computer system for all of Northern California by the time she was 18. Sica was a computer systems analyst in the pre-PC era of behemoth "mainframes" and even tried her hand at the new technology by writing a program for amortizing mortgages. At Cal state Northridge, Sica earned a bachelor’s degree in art and later a master’s degree in drawing. It was during this time that she watched a nature program on TV about elephants being slaughtered for the black-market ivory trade. Since elephants were easy to draw in black and white, she started using them as a subject. She visited the Wild Animal Park in Escondido and went to the San Diego Zoo and observed an elephant with a torn ear. She learned to appreciate the female’s more delicate features and the broader skull and larger features of the male. The rough skin she observed up close by visiting a woman who allowed her Indian and African elephants to be used by filmmakers. The Indian elephant, with its prickly hair and smaller stature, never appealed to Sica as much as the African elephant. The latter is less suitable for domestic chores and riding because of its unpredictable nature. Sica’s work is an inspiration to others because she learned to develop her creativity while battling Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She had a relapse from the disease three years after graduate school and took up quilting. She said she enjoys having friends over for quilting bees that are as much social as they are purposeful. Sica’s talents have been channeled in many interesting ways. Her husband, for example, volunteers at a vintage airplane museum in Camarillo and Sica was called upon to refurbish a World War II airplane. She painted the nose of a plane with a Vargas-style pin-up girl popular with the soldiers of the era. Because her stepson and stepdaughter are grown, Sica finds she has more time for cultivating flowers, volunteering at the Wellness Center, and drawing. Sica said she never considered creating art for a living. She also never considered living without creating art. "It’s just part of who I am," said the artist. "I can’t not create." |
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