Charles Patrick

Magic Bus

2022

Charles Patrick is best known for his intricately cut paper butterflies, suspended like museum specimens on individual entomology pins and clustered together to form icons, logos, and symbols against the backdrop of pristine canvases. Living in a world between the paper and digital ages, these works conjure feelings of nostalgia for the tactility of paper, created from vintage comic books, children’s books, currency, maps, and other obsolete ephemera. This stands in jarring contrast to the clean, pixelated designs that the butterflies form which exchange individual emotion for the universal immediacy of today’s contemporary visual language. Targets, hearts, ohms, and stars pop from the canvas in three-dimension- a fresh departure from the flat screens that are the norm today. With a background in vintage poster restoration, illustration, and printmaking, Charles Patrick combines his love of paper, art history, and design to create works that are both strikingly beautiful and poignantly thought-provoking. Charles lives and works between Cos Cob, Connecticut and Nantucket, Massachusetts.