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Patrick Quinn (born 1988 in Virginia, USA), is a renowned artist from Greenpoint in Brooklyn, New York. In 2010, he completed his BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. He graduated with a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. From 2011-2018, Patrick lived in Detroit, Michigan, and was one of four founding members of the ceramics collective Hamtramck Ceramck. His most recent solo exhibitions was Just Say Your Busy at WHAAM! gallery in January 2023 in NYC, as well as Lightning is an Angry Rainbow at McLennon Pen Co, in Austin. Notable collaborations within pop culture include Quinn making a painting to be used as the album cover for Lil Ugly Mane’s rap album Volcanic Bird Enemy and the Voiced Concern from 2021, as well as painting a lightning backdrop for rapper Bad Bunny’s recent photoshoot for the July 2023 issue of Rolling Stone.
Patrick’s most recent solo exhibition was Lightning is an Angry Rainbow at McLennon Pen Co in Austin
Hey Patrick! I’m working on the title for the piece and if you have any suggestions, lmk. I always suck at coming up with titles. It’s actually really embarrassing lol.
How about “Euthanizes Dog (best friend)?”
Patrick Quinn Euthanizes Dog (best friend)? :D:D
That kind of works. I had to put my dog down last spring.
Aaaah man. Sorry to hear that. I’ve been there. I was depressed with grief for 6 months after.
It was okay! We saw it coming for a while.
Alright, back to regular programing haha. Thank you for sitting down with me! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in Brooklyn?
The average day in Brooklyn for me begins with a small panic attack, this usually marks the departure from the dream world to reality, I think about all the things that stress me out and then I get up and spend my day stressing about things, I’m working on this. New York is grueling and constant struggle, but that could just be me and how I live. Some people have these jobs where they work from home for like four hours a day, responding to group emails, and get paid like 6 figure salaries and have nice new apartments. I sit on the rim of a hell mouth.
So growing up, what kind of kid were you, what did you enjoy doing and how did you spend your time?
As a kid I spent most of my time waging a war against the other neighborhood, and playing in the creek, I liked catching frogs and snakes and creatures. I drew a lot. I went to a lot of art museums with my grandma.
I gotta know. You recently painted a lightning backdrop for Bad Bunny, for the July 2023 issue of Rolling Stone. How did that come about?
The creative director for that project had originally reached out to my friend Hank Reavis, but Hank lives in Seattle, and he referred them to me. Check out Hank Reavis
So when did you start taking becoming an artist serious?
I’ve always been an artist, i took graffiti seriously in my early 20’s, I took ceramics seriously in my late 20’s, I moved to NYC right before the pandemic and rented a studio about 7 months into the pandemic, so I started really focusing on painting at the beginning of 2021.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I read somewhere that you was reluctant to start using the airbrush, cause you wanted to stay away from trends and focus on oil painting and ceramics instead. So I’m curious as to what got you started with the airbrush and how you got introduced to it?
I gave in during the pandemic, I also started getting tattoos, and I watched sopranos. I was coming to terms with being a member of society as society was falling apart.
While we’re on the subject. What is it about the airbrush that makes you prefer it over a regular paint brush?
Airbrush is cheaper, it’s far more economical, there aren’t any fumes, it just needs water, but also it doesn’t leave texture so if you want to paint over something it’s flat. I paint over things a lot. I think it makes everything look kind of cheap tho.
I’m curious. These past couple of years we’ve seen major increase in the popularity of the airbrush. Especially on social media like instagram. What’s your take on that?
I think we are at zeitgeist of airbrush on Instagram, to the point where it is it’s own genre. And the “real art world” lumps it into the category of low brow or juxtapoz mag. I think people like easily digestible imagery when they are doom scrolling and they like soft blurry images of cats and dogs masked off by a hard edge. The airbrush is embedded with a utilitarian function so if you have a funny idea to communicate, airbrush will get the most done with the least amount of work, and still look cool. I think paintings designed as Instagram posts are basically memes and communicate some idea or visual joke to the viewer. The painting is less about the paint than the core idea or concept. Magritte was like this, he used paint to communicate his very literal ideas and to him, painting was a chore, just a task standing between his idea and it’s conception. Magritte would have loved airbrush. And Instagram.
With that in mind, what’s your take on the importance of craft over narrative?
As a narrative painter who deeply appreciates abstraction I go back and forth, I like a clear message with zero effort in craft, I like stoner realism, I also like bad craft without any narrative. I don’t like when the technical ability is too good, it makes me feel dumb. I think my style is trying to be perfect and falling short. I still got caught in it’s trappings and concern myself with “making it look real.” Maybe people look at my work and go, awww he tried. Which is absurd because my art has no real reason to exist, and expression is something I’m interested in. Being a try hard can be expression.
The various dreamlike, surreal scenes in your work. How do you come up with them?
Sometimes the way I come up with ideas feels quite formulaic like, “take a thing and subvert that thing.” Then I start sourcing the material and stitching it together on line camera app and then airdrop to my max and project it. For a while my paintings have consisted of one, two, or three elements, but lately I feel myself falling out of that and being more interested in deeper obscurity or earnestness. If I’m having a manic episode, I’ll have a lot of ideas and get overwhelmed and shut down.
Same thing goes for the various objects, animals and characters. How do you come up with them and what’s the inspiration behind them?
I like animals, I like food. I paint things I like and things I have a personal connection to.
Gotya. Earlier this year you has a show at WHAAM! gallery, where oysters were recurring motifs in your work. What is it about oysters that made you want to document them?
I had been into oysters as a motif for a while, growing up on the east coast near the Chesapeake bay, which means bay of shell fish, the oyster just symbolized a brackish lifestyle I identify with. It also had all these connotations as an aphrodisiac and as a bivalve. The oyster is abundant with associations. It’s such a mystery. I think In art you really can’t go wrong with any reference to a shellfish, like marcel broodthaers, he recognized that. From 2015-now I’ve enjoyed the moment horseshoe crabs have had in contemporary art. Shellfish, eggs, titghtly cropped images of hands holding eggs or shellfish is basically 90% of painting these days, lol.
Can you tell me a little bit about how literal your work is?
My work is very literal, I want to be legible. I want to communicate very clearly. There isn’t much mumbling in my work. I want to be articulate, and not alienate people, I want accessibility in my work, I’m not hiding anything.
Can you also tell me about your use of symbolism?
Symbolism in my work is more literal and less cryptic, humans have always drawn animals, this is a very human thing to do. This doesn’t make me an environmentalist, there isn’t a prescribed meaning to a frog or an oyster, they are just abundant symbols.
How do you think painting deals with being well received on social media compared to being something people want to own and hang on the walls in their homes?
I think an important mantra for motivating yourself to make a good painting is asking yourself what you want to see, like would I hang this in my house and be excited? When we make a painting that aims to gain likes on Instagram we aren’t making it for ourselves. You’re a like trapper. I love getting lots of likes on Instagram, I crave the validation from total strangers on social media, I’m such a dumb whore for it. So I have to be extremely wary of such pit falls. I’ve gone full diabolical into designing the best Instagram post ever with my airbrush and jokes. Meanwhile my cryptic friends with their mfa’s are showing in galleries in the nyc downtown scene. They don’t do numbers on the gram. They make work that’s deeply personal to them and aren’t meant to be experienced on Instagram. There are artists and there are Instagram artists, and there are plenty of examples of both, but there’s also exclusively each.
I’ve had some of my most “popular on ig” paintings sell, and not sell. I made a painting of a frog being free based and it did numbers on the gram, but no one wanted to buy it and hang in their home. But sometimes you have this very general audience who is in the market for pleasant things and you can’t concern yourself with that, you have to make what you want to see, and if they fuck with you they fuck with you. Picasso said something about this, he said, “Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.” Not sure exactly how this applies to Instagram but I like it.
With that in mind. Can you walk me through your creative process, from start to end result?
I go through different creative processes. I exercise and rely on a strong mind/body connection. I feel more optimistic or excited by an idea of I’m producing endorphins, so I do a lot of working out, I have to eat a lot to think clearly, so I can’t really binge adderal, I’d fall apart and die. I’m naturally very manic and usually go through some form of mania when I’m painting or being creative. I get depressed, I go very far down and very high up, there’s rarely been a moment of smooth sailing in my life, I don’t like admitting this but I’ve induced manic states to be creative.
How do you deal with creative blocks?
I deal with creative blocks by allowing myself to sit through whatever emotion or feeling I’m experiencing and I just try to let it surface and acknowledge it and sit with it until it passes. Going for a walk helps, like getting outside your head is the best thing, when u go outside and see other people living their lives and dealing with their shit, it makes a creative block seem much less significant. Bring yourself to get outside your self by putting yourself in an unfamiliar situation. Sometimes I have a thousand ideas at once and sometimes I don’t have anything at all. That might be a manic thing, because when I revisit the ideas when I’m not having any, they aren’t as exciting or I feel totally detached from them.
Can you describe your studio practice for me? And are there any necessities you have to have with you or present in the studio?
My studio practice involves painting every day for 2-6 hours. I get to my studio, usually I procrastinate for about an hour, then I set the thing up and start working on it. Usually it’s like I clock a days work by two podcasts and an album or Spotify radio. Facing a canvas and working, that’s the thing, that’s what I do. Sometimes it’s work and sometimes it’s play, like I have to ask questions in the studio by making a mess or using a tool I never use, and then I rope it back in.
How do you approach color?
Color is insane, I bring myself to it. And I always get it wrong in the first go, I put layers of corrections and I edits over mistakes. I mix the color in my airbrush and it’s almost never enough or I add too much of one color or another, until I eventually tell myself that’s good enough. When I oil paint it’s way easier to mix and play with color.
Who are you paying attention to atm… Do you have any favorite current artists?
My top three are Jana euler, Jamian Juliano-Vilani, and Isy Wood. The output and vision and energy of those three painters is insane. They have laid out the blueprint. They have set the standard. They go very hard. I can’t even think of anyone else.
I think Shelley Uckotter’s show at kings leap was the best painting show of the year and I’m really excited for what Marika Thunder is going to do in the new year. Also I think people need to keep an eye on Kati Kirsch she cookin fr.
What motivates you?
The thing that motivates me is the dinners. I want the fancy dinners, I want to go out to eat at fancy restaurants and ball out. To be imbibed. I want a gut like Russell Crowe.
How would you describe a perfect day?
A perfect day is being near the ocean in the summer and smoking weed and eating food and being hydrated with people you love.
Alright Patrick. I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
Ok damn so many great films, and I’m going to base my decision not so much on the merit of the film but my deeply personal nostalgic connection to it, which is the sound of music, I stan Julie Andrews, I love a musical, and I’m a total europhile and this movie is the most Hollywood version of Europe as a fantasy. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, Schnitzel with noodles, etc.
The second is. What song(s) are you currently listening to the most right now?
Since the Caroline polacheck tiny desk came out I’ve been playing pretty impossible a lot, that’s been the song on repeat for like the last two weeks, before that it was meet me at our spot by willow smith, it plagued my life for about a month, caught a vibe I reckon.