Patrick Pearson

Visual artist exploring the mystery and beauty of trees.

Patrick Pearson is an award-winning visual artist in Adelaide, South Australia. South African-born and self-taught, but coached early on by the artists Hunter Nesbit and Gordon Hill, his work can be found in private collections in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.

Patrick paints in oils on canvas, creating powerful, immersive and intriguing abstracts, particularly of the bark patterns and shapes of trees, artworks which reflect as influences the Impressionist painters (particularly Matisse), Kandinsky, Palaeolithic cave art, and the cubist-like nature of traditional African mask design. His painting practice stems from a deep concern at the loss of old-growth forests and the ongoing extinction of wild species, and his aim is that viewers of his artworks see what is on the canvas as something unfamiliar – before the sudden realisation dawns that it is familiar and known after all, a process the artist suggests is his contribution to de-marginalising the natural world.

Constant themes in his paintings are the convoluted beauty of natural patterns, the ways in which wild species inhabit the human and natural worlds, an animistic belief that natural places and creatures possess a spiritual essence or consciousness, and the relationship of humans with the wilder world. 

Patrick experiments constantly with a mix of brushwork and palette knife within the abstracted explorations, working and reworking the paint on the canvas to reveal creature, spirit or human forms hidden within the bark patterns or tree shapes, so that the deeper one looks, the more one sees.