Patrick Fleming | art.works.northwest

This is what I do. I remember drawing pictures in 1948 while being snowed in our Pasco home and I have never stopped. I know that everyone needs to have a means of expressing themselves either consciously or unconsciously, legally or illegally. Producing and teaching art are the ways that I have found to satisfy that need.

I went through illustration school and became an illustrator where my goal was to solve other people’s visual challenges. I returned to school after our first child was born and I got wrapped up in abstract welded sculpture and paintings as means of setting up and expressing my own visual statements. Over the years, I became aware of the subtle beauty of the local area and started painting en plein air. In Paris in 2008, we came upon a Mesopotamian painter who produced small pictures of Paris scenes. We bought one and I have been admiring it since. I started painting, in small format, local scenes and find it very interesting and pleasing.

As a graduate student, I found that making coffee cups for restaurants and other wholesale outlets paid homage to my heritage, that being a bricklayer for my father, a master mason and contractor. The mind set, while producing hundreds of coffee cups and laying 1000 brick a day is very similar. They both become meditative over time. I feel like I was born to do what I do and I do not feel good if I am not working. I am satisfied to say “this is what I do.”

Phone: (509)627-8980

Email: patrickflemingart.com