Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Patrick Turner. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Patrick, thanks for joining us today. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

I was contemplating an earlier than planned retirement ( Supply Chain Director) with coworkers and suppliers at a luncheon when I mentioned that I’d have to find a home for the 24×48 painting on my office wall because we didn’t have anywhere to hang it at home. Instantly, two of the suppliers said they would buy it and we settled on $350. I had painted it in 1982 which is about the year that I stopped painting (until restarting during covid), it never occurred to me that people would pay real money for my paintings.

Patrick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

HOW IT ALL STARTED My parents took me to London and Paris when I was 15, in 1975. In Paris’ Montmartre district, we watched a man in a wheelchair paint a 16×20 water scene in oil, with a pallet knife. My dad bought the painting for $55. When we came home, I bought the supplies and tried to duplicate the painting and did a pretty good job. From then until about 1985 I painted 15 or so paintings and gave most of them away, but still have a few of them hanging in my home. Life gets busy and you just don’t have time to paint. I always said that I would start painting again when I retired. COVID2020 After the first three weeks of lockdown working from home, the honey-do list that I’d been building for 22 years was finished and I was bored. As luck would have it, my eldest son gave me some stretched canvas’ last Christmas and I got my 35 year old box of paints out from under the garage tool bench. The paints that I last used in about 1985 were all still good. So, I started painting. I’m loving it! In August of 2020, my oldest nephew called to tell me that he only had a few months to live due to cancer. This is also the most time that my wife and I have spent together since I was unemployed in 1999 and as it turns out, we still like each other 😊 Coupled with my renewed love of painting, I moved up my retirement by 3 years to July 2021 because life is short.

When people first started buying my paintings in 2020, I started to paint things that I thought would sell and of course, they didn’t. So I went back to painting what I like to paint. I like a challenge and try to paint things that I don’t know how they”ll come out until it’s done. I decided that every painting has someone on earth that will love it, I just have to wait until they see it. So I paint for me and I also do commissions which I mostly enjoy. Textures and bold colors are really my thing, that’s what I see. I really don’t like the selling part, it makes me feel very awkward which is not the way that I’ve felt for the past 35 years in manufacturing.

I have done a few portraits but I really don’t enjoy them, however; when I picked up a canvas in late May and started painting my 1st grandchild, Josephine Lyra (born May 8th), from a photo after her first bath at home, it just happened. After the first 2 hours, it looked like her and 2 hours later it was as close to a photo as I’ve ever been able to achieve. It was very spooky how quickly it came together, like someone was doing it for me. I may never paint another portrait again because it’ll never be any better than that one.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

To me, every local, state and federal building should have every bare spot of wall or floor plastered with art, even if it’s art that I don’t particularly care for or understand, Art is still better than nothing and much better than pieces commemorating every rich person that passed through the doors of government. Imagine if you walked into the dreaded DMV and while you waited your hour minimum, you had 35 different paintings or sculptures to occupy your senses. I, as do many others have difficultly finding outlets to show our work. A peer in my town who also started after she retired early a few years ago agree that there aren’t enough galleries and it’s kind of a closed society, we hate the weekend tent events where you spend 6 to 8 hours and might sell one or two works. I hang many works in wine bars, restaurants, bottle shops and tiny galleries in out of the way places. While I haven’t sold many of them directly, I have gotten the most repeat commissions from them. As one artist told me in the beginning of this recent journey, nobody’s going to see them gathering dust in your bonus room.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Call me an old man but I don’t like them and I think that they threaten art in it’s totality. My biggest concern is with the AI side of it as it will be almost impossible to tell if a painting is digitally created by a machine or a person. The current atmosphere is so strewn with scammers that I refuse to touch it. No one would ever pay $6,000 for one of my paintings made into an nft, and they shouldn’t…..but that’s what they offer. I’m sure that there are a few out there that make a lot of money from turning their work into nft’s but I’m not bein g a part of it. Someday, hopefully, the nft fad will fade and people will demand the canvas again.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://patzartpoetryinpainting.com/
• Instagram: @patzart_poetry_in_painting
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Patzartpoetryinpainting
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in.patrick-turner-a22a302