Pamela Sinkler has been a working artist living in the Philadelphia area since the 1970s. She has worked in intaglio etching, watercolor, pastels, pencil and oil, and has won prizes at juried and invitational shows.

Born in Athens, Greece in 1938 to prominent archeologist parents Dorothy Burr Thomson and Homer Thompson. Her father was the son of a Canadian dairy farmer, and her mother the daughter of author Anna Robeson Brown Burr. Pamela grew up in Princeton where she began creating art at the age of four, sketching countless pictures of horses, her favorite subject. She was so precocious that when she showed her teacher one of her drawings, the teacher vehemently refused to believe she had done it.

She formally studied art for the first time at the Burnley School of Advertising Art in Seattle in 1959. The sixties were spent raising children in Ohio and Indiana. In 1972, as a newly single mother of four in the Philadelphia suburbs, she re-enrolled at Bryn Mawr college to finish the art history degree she had begun after high school. There, she was introduced to intaglio etching by Fritz Janschka.

With this new skill, she founded Gourmet Graphics, a small business and a line of decorative fine art etchings that shared the theme of edibles. Her technique represented an innovative break from the traditional etching form. Unlike most etchings which are inscribed on a rectangular plate, Pamela decided to cut out the plates themselves around the outlines of the impressions. Using a jeweler’s saw, she meticulously cut through the 1/16” zinc plates. Hand-wiped with printing inks, each plate produced a unique, multi-colored image pressed into Rives and d'Arches paper under the massive roller of a Charles Brand Etching Press. She further innovated by combining and rearranging on the paper various plates in different colors and compositions. Later she added fish, seashells and other sea creatures to the collection.

In the 1980s she began to paint house portraits by commission, creating works of city townhouses, historic buildings, businesses, country estates and farms. She also revisited her early interest in horses in works depicting the Hunt Club race meets.

In the 1990s and 2000s she focused her attention on floral watercolor still lifes, paying as much attention to the arrangement of the flowers’ submerged stems as to the blossoms themselves. The colors, reflections, refractions and shapes within the transparent containers are integral to the overall design and effect. These paintings often reflect her travels; their titles often including the name of the locale where the subject originated, from London to Sydney.

In more recent years she studied oil painting with close friend and instructor Carolyn Howard, specializing in cityscapes and urban architectural spaces. She enjoys the geometry and tonal contrasts found in everyday surroundings, be it a lady’s dressing table or a bank of light switches.

Pamela sold widely and distributed her work to galleries and the decorating trade from Maine to Bermuda, showing at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Woodmere Gallery, Rittenhouse Square Art Annual, Yellow Springs Art Show, Gallery 100 in Princeton, and Brick Market Gallery in Newport, RI. She has had solo shows in galleries such as Newman Galleries, Bryn Mawr, and William Ris Galleries of Stone Harbor, New Jersey. Her work is also in the collections of Charles Scribner III, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Lending Gallery and Dover Historic Properties of Philadelphia.

Pamela has worked as a commercial artist, illustrating four popular books published by Harper and Row, Random House, and Norton, as well as creating designs for the textile industry. She belongs to the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She is a signature member of Philadelphia Watercolor Club, and has been a member of The Historical Preservation Committee of the Society Hill Civic Association.