A CANBERRA artist, virtually unknown in the ACT, has just finished holding a month-long solo exhibition of new works at the Artifact Gallery in New York City.

Patricia Manzitti Van Den Nieuwenhuijzen, who describes herself as self-taught, has been painting seriously in oils and mixed media for the past 20 years.

She says she never had a single break here, has failed in her efforts to meet people in any of the commercial galleries, also gaining no traction with the community art groups.

Despite this, she has a flourishing international art career and a pile of trophies and honorary degrees to show for it, many of them from her heritage country, Italy, but elsewhere, too.

Van Den Nieuwenhuijzen believes she has successfully created a drawing style and abstract art that is all her own and wants to be known as a master of free curve drawings and multidimensional linear abstract art. 

She is especially inspired by the example of Picasso, who wanted to be recognised but not to be told how to produce his art. 

Born in Australia to Italian parents and a fluent Italian speaker, she always felt like a natural artist but was frustrated.

“I won every art competition at school,” she says. 

“But at high school, all of my submitted art pieces were always lost by my art teacher.

“In the end I was so hurt that I stopped art classes in school… and progressed with my mathematics development.”

Nowadays she is a sessional academic with the University of Canberra, teaching maths and acting as a statistical consultant to higher-degree research students.

Her failure to make inroads in Canberra may be related to her determinedly abstract style, of which she says: “I realised that my art was drastically different from everyone else, that I did not belong.”

But two years after marrying her husband, Marjo, in 1999 she decided to launch herself as an artist. 

She remembers meeting the male director of an art gallery in the inner south, who told her to loosen her style, then showed her the door, but then she phoned – of all place – the NGA to ask what do to, where an officer advised her to get a proper website and introduced her to their photographer, whose praise confirmed that her artwork was ready for show.

“After the photography was done, I started knocking on doors of various Canberra art galleries, all of which were hostile and frankly not interested in me or even meeting me,” she says. 

Then she scored a two-month solo exhibition at the Hyatt Hotel’s Promenade Restaurant, which led to an offer from a Sydney art dealer who pulled out when she became pregnant, so she was back to square one. 

Not having been trained in a recognised Sydney, Canberra, or Melbourne school was a drawback and, indeed, even overseas-trained artists often find it hard to get a foot in the door here.

That’s when she started submitting her works overseas and it was a very different story. If Van Den Nieuwenhuijzen had been unnoticed here in Canberra, she’s had no trouble in Italy.

In 2013 she was approached by an art publishing house: INCO Publishing NYC, who inspected her latest paintings and included her. The publication was distributed to major galleries, museums and art dealers around the world and that was when the Italians noticed her.

First she was approached by art critic Rino Lucia, who asked permission to have her artwork graded by his colleague Paolo Levi, who classified her as master artist. After that, she exhibited in the Biennale della Creativita in Verona where an even more important critic, Vittorio Sgarbi, paid close attention to her paintings. The rest is history.

The internet is Van Den Nieuwenhuijzen’s friend and while she can’t always get to her overseas shows, the increased interest in digital exhibitions allowed her to participate in a world digital exhibition and fashion presentation staged by the Costanza Foundation in New York during 2019, which in turn led to her offer from Artifact Gallery, where she has just exhibited.

Grounded for years caring for her frail mother who died earlier this year, she is still grieving. As well, her 16-year-old daughter Joelle is a dancer with professional aspirations who is training with Suzy Piani and Bonnie Neate’s company, The Training Ground, a prep school for elite young dancers, so Van Den Nieuwenhuijzen feels the need to be with her.

Undaunted, she pushes on. With the Pablo Picasso Award and the Giotto International Prize behind her, she has in the past three years alone won the Leonardo Da Vinci, the Dante Alighieri, the Hermes, the Cesinatico and the Poseidon Art Prizes as well as the Golden Palm Award in Monaco and has just officially accepted a place in the Menelao Prize held in Lecce, southern Italy, in December.

“Reflecting on these past 20 years, I have been very busy and… all on my own, with no help or funding from anyone, I have done really well, ” she says. You can say that again.