Pamela Ramey Tatum is a full-time professional and award-winning artist currently residing in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, a town known for its artists as much as its beautiful beaches. Her interest in art began in childhood—her mother is also an artist.  She first studies Commercial Art but soon realized she has the soul of a fine artist.

In college Tatum studied English and theater, ultimately earning a Masters degree in English Literature. She fell in love with stories and now combines her love of art with storytelling. “For me, it’s always about the story,” she says.

Tatum has a working studio at The Hub on Canal, a vibrant art space in New Smyrna Beach representing 60+ artists.  The Hub serves as a gallery as well as a place to work, teach and connect with other artists. 

She has painted a variety of subjects in her career: portraits, figures, still lifes, as well as seascapes and landscapes. In 2012 she began painting with a knife to create textured, multi-layered paintings with lots of color. She has painted several city scene series and has painted Paris, NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, London, Seattle, Tokyo, and more. These paintings are rainy scenes with lots of people bustling about under umbrellas and always with lovers as the main focus. For her, telling a story and moving the viewer is most important to her.

New York City is a frequent subject of hers. She spent a lot of time there in the mid 1990’s. In 1999 she spent a year in Amritsar, India, and after that, traveled for a year in France, Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey, The Greek Isles, Slovakia, Israel and and, Egypt. The thing she loves most about traveling is meeting people and hearing their stories. She uses the stories, the feelings from her travels in her work.

Tatum paints with a contemporary feel and has elements of expressionism and impressionism in her knife paintings. She creates pieces that are modern, dynamic, and fresh. These have become her most popular pieces. She receives many commissions for palette knife paintings as well as for portraits.

Throughout her career, Tatum has studied with many well-known artists, including David Gray, James Pratt, Seth Haverkamp, Morgan Samuel Price, Stacy Barter, and Marian Pacsuta. She also had the good fortune of having representational Master Artist, Robert Dorman as her mentor for two years.

Tatum has won many awards for her city scenes, portraits and figurative paintings. Her work is in private collections in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Because of the high demand for her city scene pieces, her focus has been more on selling her work over the past five years. Her number one problem is that she can't paint fast enough to meet the demands for her dynamic city scene palette knife paintings. They often sell while still on her easel.