Patrick Lee and the Courage to Make a Mess

Part II of IV

In Part I of this series, we stepped into a room where a table refused to behave, Cézanne’s quiet revolution that gave painters permission to trust perception over certainty.
This next conversation moves from that historical turning point into a living studio, where those questions about structure, intuition, and seeing continue to unfold in real time.

I’ve learned something working with painters: the people who really know how to make the work tend to be the least precious about it.

They’ll stand in front of something that took them days, weeks, sometimes months, and say, almost casually: I might paint over it.

Not out of dissatisfaction. Not out of drama. But because the painting is still talking. Because there’s a thread they haven’t followed yet. Because curiosity, once it shows up, becomes a responsibility.

That’s the energy you feel when you sit down with Patrick Lee in his studio.

Before the official interview begins, we’re talking about something every gallery learns early: collectors are complicated in the most human way. People want the thrill of seeing what an artist does next until it’s time to actually buy.

They love the promise of evolution, but they’re often purchasing a kind of emotional homecoming.

Patrick knows this without bitterness. He says it plainly, like someone describing weather.

People fall in love with a certain way you paint. A certain world you build. And even when they ask what’s next, what they mean is: Show me the next version of the thing I already trust.

Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s recognition. Maybe it’s the comfort of returning to a place that feels like your own memory even when it’s someone else’s painting.

Patrick’s work holds that door open. His interiors and exteriors, tables, buildings, rooms with a kind of hush, land in that genre where viewers bring their own stories without being told what to feel.

And he’s very clear: that’s the point.

The impulse to make something

Patrick didn’t begin with oil paint. In high school he worked in acrylics, copying images, like many young artists do. But in college, what grabbed him first was abstraction, the way shapes and color could evoke mood without explanation.

He describes the urge to paint the way some people describe an urge to hum, or build, or keep a journal. Less like a career decision and more like a human reflex.

“I’ve always had an impulse to want to make something,” he tells me. “Or say something… you’d see something and be like, I have ideas about that too.”

When I ask whether art is self-expression for him or for other people, he answers quickly: mainly for him. If people like it, wonderful, but that wasn’t the engine at the start.

His earliest encouragement wasn’t institutional. It was domestic. Family. Sisters asking him to draw a car, a house. A mother who could draw on command, cats, portraits, little scenes, simply because she could.

At school, he became the kid who can draw, the kid who gets called to the chalkboard to sketch TIE fighters and Star Wars ships in second grade.

It’s funny what we remember from childhood: not just the talent, but the feeling of being seen.

Adults notice. Kids notice. And suddenly, the act of making something becomes a way to belong.

Intuition is a kind of listening

When Patrick talks about intuition, he doesn’t romanticize it. He calls it what it is: a guess. A gut feeling. A small internal pull toward something that looks interesting and the willingness to follow it.

For him, intuition begins with a visual impulse: two colors side by side in a study; something glimpsed in nature; the residue of a film scene; the atmosphere of a paragraph in a book. Sometimes it’s not even an image, just a few words that unlock an entire visual memory.

He’s adamant about one practical thing: write it down.

Ideas arrive when you’re driving or showering, when you can’t sketch. If you don’t capture them, they slip away. And when you look back through a sketchbook months later, you’ll find these strange notes, messages from a past self you barely remember, but which still contain a spark.

He describes that spark as the subconscious handing you a folded note in class. Pay attention to it. Even if it leads nowhere, it might lead to something else.

Why he avoids storyboarding

As we talk, it becomes clear Patrick is deeply influenced by narrative forms, novels, film, even overheard conversations. His paintings often feel like book covers for stories that haven’t been written yet.

But he resists literal storytelling.

He isn’t interested in illustrating a plot so much as translating an emotional atmosphere.

There’s something he keeps circling: the idea that the mood is the real subject.

In literature, a story unfolds. In painting, the entire world sits in front of you at once. That changes everything. It forces the artist to distill, to compress, to design.

So Patrick builds structure, but leaves breathing room. He wants the observer to participate. And when someone tells him what they see in his work, even if it wasn’t what he meant, he doesn’t correct them.

If it helps them, if it connects, that’s enough.

Make a mess and clean it up

At one point I ask about the notans covering his wall¹.

Patrick surprises me: he doesn’t really think of them as studies anymore. They’re their own works. A small one isn’t less valid than a large canvas. He tries not to over separate categories like finished versus in process, because those distinctions can make you stiff.

His process description is the kind you want to put on a wall in an art classroom: make a mess and clean it up.

He starts with pattern, then carves back into it, discovering structure inside the chaos. Painting is forgiving. You can repaint, refine, rebuild. That forgiveness gives him permission to move fast at the beginning, to destroy preciousness, to let accident open a door.

And then later to bring clarity.

The focal point as a revelation

Patrick uses focal points deliberately. In the middle of abstraction, he’ll sharpen one area. That clarity changes the whole painting. It gives context. It heightens everything around it.

A refined plate can make the surrounding shapes read as a table. A sky blue apple is still an apple if the shape and context tell you so.

Once the viewer believes you, you can push the color anywhere.

Art history as permission

Patrick talks about art history the way working painters do, as permission.

We drift into Cézanne, into photography, into the moment painting was freed from the obligation to simply record reality. What remained was design, mood, structure, emotion.

The throughline is simple: painting didn’t lose its purpose, it discovered a new one.

Family, and the miracle of a life

The most tender part of our conversation comes when we talk about his family.

His wife, Christa, encouraged him to commit fully to painting. Patrick doesn’t describe his career as inevitable. He describes it as unbelievable.

He talks about standing in his studio and thinking: I can’t believe I’m in here.

And that gratitude shapes everything. Even failure isn’t catastrophic. A painting can be repainted. Rebuilt. Transformed.

What comes next

Patrick’s upcoming March exhibition feels less like a conclusion and more like a continuation. He hints at returning to more drawing, more realism, because curiosity led him there. He’s painted over works weeks after calling them finished. Under many paintings, another painting still lives.

This time he’s stayed with buildings and interiors, following the shapes that feel most alive to him right now.

He’ll be exhibiting alongside Brian Charles Johnson, an artist who approaches painting with a sense of purpose that feels almost devotional.

It’s a pairing that suggests something larger than a show. A conversation about why artists keep returning to the studio at all.

Looking Ahead

If Cézanne gave painters permission to see differently, and Patrick shows us what it means to follow that permission in practice, the next question is where that impulse comes from, the artists, ideas, and moments that shape a painter’s sense of purpose.

In Part III, we’ll step into that lineage of influence before turning, finally, to Brian Charles Johnson’s story and the exhibition that brings these conversations into one shared space.

You’re invited

Join us on the evening of March 13 for Outlier, an exhibition featuring the work of Patrick Lee and Brian Johnson.
The show brings these ideas out of conversation and into the shared space of the gallery, where mood, structure, and personal vision can be experienced firsthand.

We would love to see you there.

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Footnote

¹ Notan is a concept originating in Japanese design that explores the harmony between light and dark shapes. Artists often create notan studies in black and white to simplify a composition and understand its visual structure before or alongside color.

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Resources & Further Reading

Arthur Wesley Dow
Composition: Understanding Line, Notan, and Color

Richard Shiff
Cézanne and the End of Impressionism

John Berger
Ways of Seeing

David Bayles and Ted Orland
Art & Fear

James Elkins
What Painting Is

These texts offer context for the themes Patrick touches on, intuition, structure, and the quiet dialogue between artist and viewer.