Patrick DeAngelis was raised in the Industrial Heartland, or the “Rust Belt”, an area where automotive manufacturing and steel production geographically overlap. His father, Dominico Anthony DeAngelis, was a mechanic for 25 years in Cleveland, Ohio. Patrick spent most of his youth assisting his dad and watching him work on rusty automobiles. He hated sitting in that garage but loved looking at the shapes and colors of the materials.

After high school, when the time came to choose between attending college or follow in his father’s footsteps as a mechanic, he did not hesitate. He attended Kent State University for his bachelor’s degree. A year later, he moved to NYC to become an artist and acquired his masters degree at the prestigious New York Academy of Art. He sees his most recent work as a chance to reflect on his life growing up in north east Ohio, a place that will always be near to his heart and as a summary of his experiences while studying art at two very different universities. The New York Academy of Art offered a refined, technique and process-oriented education while Kent State University instilled the importance of concept and abstraction. As a result, his work combines traditional techniques, 20th century processes and ideas, and contemporary strategies in new forms of media. Patrick uses mediums such as collected scrap metal and salvaged wood to communicate the beauty of where he’s from and to express the sadness of what it’s become.

“My work is an organization of predetermined and spontaneous materials and marks; a balance of conceptual and aesthetic intentions combined with intuitive or subconscious mark making. Each piece is an opportunity to document an emotion, a level of innocence, a level of understanding, and a level of ignorance of a moment in time. Subjects fluctuate between social issues, love, the pursuit of home or the feeling of home, entrances and exits, and reflections on the changing times. I always document the date, time, where I am, and what I’m thinking at that moment; I see the piece as a surface to journal and record my life. During the creative processes it’s important for me to address surface quality and generate an emotional response to tactile qualities of the piece. Color relationships are also very important in my work, I often experiment with translucent neutral mixtures and how they relate to intense opaque colors.

Vincent Desidario, a figurative painter in New York once told me that there are three dynamic relationships in painting: light versus dark, transparent versus opaque, and warm versus cool. At the time I was painting the figure exclusively and I would focus on these relationships while attempting to render the figure and the illusion of form. Over time I became less interested in painting the figure or space or form, instead I began focusing only on the relationships themselves. Instead of painting light vs. dark in an attempt to create an illusion, I began painting light vs. dark just as it is. I’ve since added three more relationships that I consider to be important in my work: neutral vs. intense, textured vs. smooth and horizontal vs. vertical. Aesthetically my work is an ongoing investigation of these contrasting relationships. My paintings are assembled from salvaged materials and constructed in a sculpture manner; I want the final piece to be seen as a painting, an object, a document, and a personal journal.”

-Patrick DeAngelis