Community Profiles

Pamela Moss

Who are you when you are doing what you love? Who is it that you could be? These questions are a starting point for Pamela Moss after she’s been commissioned to paint a portrait. The finished product is a portrait of the subject embodying their "higher Self." 

Moss, 45, a longtime Ithaca resident, was a freelance writer and homeschooling mom before realizing her true self as a painter. "I used to do art as a kid and always wanted to be an artist," Moss explains. "Then as a teenager I got really self-conscious about it. I started to sneer at myself, 'Who do you think you are?'"

Less than two years later, she's painted seven portraits, including a self portrait and portraits of friends and family. At first, she painted for free just to get some practice, but now people pay her for portraits, and she's turned her passion into a business, Pamela Moss Portraits. She recently celebrated her new business with an art opening at the Clinton House.    

When a client commissions a portrait, which can be of a single person, a couple, or a family, Moss starts the process with two hour-long interviews. She starts by getting the person to talk about what they love to do and how it is different from the rest of their life. "When we’re doing what we love, we're expressing who we have the capacity to be," Moss explains, "and that's what I'm going to paint."

One of her portraits shows the subject meditating, with a beautiful blue and purple mountainside in the background, and surrounded by objects that are important to his life. Moss says, "The portraits can be used as a guide or reminder of who you can be. Some people use them as a mediation tool; they have a sort of therapeutic quality about them."

Moss believes she's fortunate to have a supportive spouse, Brian Hall, whom she's been married to for twenty-two years. After her revelation in New York City, she returned to Ithaca with the intention to start painting, even though she hadn't picked up a paintbrush in more than twenty years. Now, she says, things are really picking up, and, perhaps best of all, she's doing what she loves; she's finding out what's possible.