Artist's Statement

Patrick Oates paints figures and landscapes that never quite reveal whether they are emerging or disappearing. His work returns to familiar people he never met, places he can't quite claim, and the gap between what gets passed down and what gets imagined around it. The same air and light hold every painting, regardless of subject. A single world runs through the work, built from rural landscapes, family folklore, and personal observation rather than any fixed place. Small anomalies recur: light that behaves strangely, colour that belongs to a feeling rather than an observation — following no logic, only its own inevitability. The work asks what we carry, what we come from, and where we belong, then refuses to answer. That refusal is the point.