Patrick Oates

Says Patrick Oates of this work, "The arches arrived before their meaning did. Veiled over a seascape, they sit somewhere between cathedral window and apparition, neither fully one nor the other. The sea continues behind them, indifferent.

"The painting came from an interest in the gestures people make toward the unknown, prayer, ritual, superstition, and the structures, literal and imagined, that hold those gestures in place. There is something in the act of looking for reassurance that interests me more than whether it is ever found.

"The arches don’t resolve into religion or architecture. They remain a question the viewer brings their own answer to."

Oates paints figures and landscapes that never quite reveal whether they are emerging or disappearing. The 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 emerges across the work, built from rural landscapes, family folklore and personal observation rather than any fixed place. Small anomalies recur; light behaving strangely, colour belonging to a feeling rather than observation, following no logic but feeling slightly inevitable. The work asks what we carry, what we come from, and where we belong, then refuses to answer. That refusal is the point.