Glasscock meticulously paints her flowers from real life, one by one, so they in fact are treated as individuals. This grave and exacting treatment of her subject removes it from the trivial: anything examined this closely reveals complexities and presences that otherwise go unseen. --Rebecca Solnit (from a review in The Pacific Sun, April 22, 1988)
Pamela Glasscock’s watercolors explore a botanical realism that combines the careful observation of plants with a focus on their expressive possibilities. Her work has been exhibited for thirty-five years in contemporary art galleries and museums as well as in venues for botanical art.
Glasscock studied art, music, and literature at Stanford University, and after graduation in 1972 moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. She worked for ten years in the Renaissance drawing technique of silverpoint, developing a personal version of that medium on large rigid panels, spray-painted and sanded to a porcelain-smooth surface. The subjects of these large drawings ranged from landscape and still life to abstracted images inspired by botanical forms.
During the early 1980's, Glasscock’s focus shifted toward careful renditions of flowers using watercolor rather than silverpoint, color rather than a limited grey scale. What had begun as an experimental diversion into a new medium became an ever-expanding interest in painting plants, the details and mysteries of how they look, the elusive sense that they have something to communicate.
Working from live flower models in the studio, Glasscock created single portraits of flowers as well as compositions of diverse flowers in tableaux which suggest theatrical performances as much as botanical expositions.
The flower forms are beautiful in themselves, energetic and dynamic, but even the negative space in her pictures has that quality...These subjects are not figures or representations of humans but are representations instead of things humans relate to, things that satisfy both our esthetic sense and our need for shelter and comfort. The artist imbues her subjects with attributes that we can identify with. Perhaps what we term beauty is a synthesis of a satisfying bond or recognition we feel upon viewing a work and the sense of awe we feel when confronting an image that is new, mysterious, or puzzling. --Phil Linares, curator Oakland Museum of California, in the notes for Beholding Beauty, cBedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA, 1999
In the late 1990's Glasscock began to look for subjects in wild places, near to and far from home, using her photographs of native plants from the field as references for a new "place-based" series of paintings, while continuing to develop several series of horticultural subjects from real flowers in the studio.
Distinct and interwoven themes have emerged, and continue in the work: attention to the concept of time, lifecycles, and the seasons; the character and beauty of particular species or botanical families; the marvel of wild plants around the globe; and how these have traveled and been changed through both natural distribution and horticulture.
Glasscock lives with her husband, the artist Tony King, on a rural property in Northern California.
In January 2018 the Haldan Gallery in South Lake Tahoe, CA mounted a joint exhibition, INSIDE/OUTSIDE EXPLORATIONS: PAMELA GLASSCOCK and TONY KING. The show presented forty works: Glasscock's watercolors of wild and cultivated flowers, and King's recent oil paintings and drawings of western landscapes as well as his large-scale portraits of Bristlecone Pines.