Red, White, and Blue
Oil on canvas
48" x 20"
Patrick Glover’s paintings cover a lot of territory: mindless consumerism, suburban anomie, and more. But the work for which he is best—and deservedly—known is an ongoing series of hyper-realistic oil paintings of the world as seen through a rain-spattered windshield.
These paintings read like moody narrative fragments—as if the viewer has been dropped into the middle of story with little clue as to how it began or how it will end. But to Glover, they are far more than melancholy dispatches from the road.
In addition the usual artist’s personal role-call of historic and contemporary artists, there are many interests that inform Glover’s work. Situationist theory, quantum physics, and existentialism are only a few of what he half-jokingly describes as “a huge mess of influences, only half of which I understand.” But readings in cognitive science and his profound interest in recognition vs. perception permeate just about everything he does and go to the core of his artistic practice.
We are evolutionarily biased to recognize, not perceive, he says, “because otherwise we would have been eaten by that tiger out on the savannah.” But it is through perception that we analyze and make sense of a complex world.
School bus
Oil on canvas
60" x 40"
In a way that mirrors Glover’s research interests, there are two distinct phases to the making of his paintings. In what could be called the Recognition Phase, Glover, ever alert for bad weather (the National Weather Service website is his start page), heads out in his truck on rainy days to shoot images. There is an automatic quality to this activity, something that he sees as an almost existentialist endeavor. Despite the lost quality of his paintings, Glover tends to stick to familiar roads, primarily for safety reasons. Anyway, he says, “I have found that the rain distortions are such an uncontrollable, random variable, place is not all that crucial.”
Next, comes the Perception Phase, the painstaking work that occurs in the studio. “All of the planning and compositional choices are made once I see what I have on the camera, which is always a surprise.” The imagery lends itself to experimentation. “I have made up to 10 different paintings from a single image,” Glover says. “I will sometimes spend months—even years—considering, sorting and re-cropping before I will commit an image to a canvas.” Even so, he is faithful to the images as he draws them up on canvas.
In the studio, Glover strives to be free of preconceptions and ego, to be open to the happy accident. He is, as he says, “not married to a style.” However, his painting tends to follow a certain trajectory. He first blocks in color quickly, with little concern for accuracy. After that, he plays around with different oil glazes, mixing and applying them “in ways that would make any materials or method purist want to scream” and in a way that often yields upredictable results. As the painting takes shape, he then becomes blissfully immersed in obsessive details.
School bus (detail)
Oil on canvas
“In the end, what I am really looking to accomplish is a balance of tensions. The images themselves are loaded with inherent tensions—between recognition/perception/ambiguity—a sense of mystery and familiarity, beauty and danger, the mundane and life threatening.”
While Glover is comfortable talking about his process and the myriad ideas that undergird his work, he’s a bit more reticent about offering personal details, perhaps due in part to his visceral dislike for an attitude that often values a good backstory over direct engagement with a work of art. However, if you persist, here is some of the information you can eventually drag out of him:
Born in 1965 in Babylon, New York, Glover spent his first five years in West Islip and the next 13 in Watkins Glen (“the scenic, economically and politically backward Finger Lakes region,” he calls it). He graduated from Cooper Union, the legendary tuition-free school of art, architecture, and engineering and remained in New York City where he embarked on a career that saw him both painting in his studio and working for a variety of clients doing murals and decorative restoration, including the restoration of the New York Public Library building. Among Glover’s numerous other clients and collectors are Jones New York, Judd Hirsch, Philip Glass, and the Kalif of Saudi Arabia. His exhibition venues include Somerhill Gallery, Center of the Earth Gallery, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Art Palm Beach, Greenville Museum of Art, Bridge Art Fair, and many others.
He has lived in Charlotte since 2002.
Copper van
Oil on canvas
56" x 36"
Where did these current paintings come from? In the mid-90s, Glover wanted to address painting traditions—specifically still life, landscape, portrait—from the perspective of his interests in consumerism and mass production.
Mass production, which simultaneously fascinates and repulses Glover, is not only another major influence, but it also dovetails with Glover’s interest in recognition and perception. He’s fixated on the idea that our instinctive need to seek out the recognizable has collided with mass production to yield subdivisions, fast food, and other devilments of modern life.
Glover initially produced a series of still lives featuring TVs and other objects, revelling in the fact that no matter what else was pictured, the image on the TV dominated the painting. He also did a series of paintings that featured highways, which appealed to him because of the ubiquity of the highway in the American landscape, as well as its standardized, anonymous nature. But he was also drawn to the beauty of the highway, with its engineered curves and signage. However, after a few of these paintings, he felt he had reached a dead end, no pun intended.
In 2002, Glover came to Charlotte to partner in his brother’s mural business. Here, he had what is arguably a defining experience for a New Yorker newly arrived in the South—adapting to hours spent in a car. He began shooting photographs while driving, and, one rainy day brought the epiphany that rain on the windshield yielded images that were recognizable, but also altered one’s perception. It was not only suited to abstractness of paint, but it also was another opportunity to play with a convention of painting, by investing a traditional landscape with contemporary meaning.
Tanker
Oil on canvas
72" x 48"
Patrick Glover seeks to make paintings that are approachable but unsettling. “I feel as if I have managed to finally combine a subject that so far has seemed endlessly intriguing—on many levels—with an approach that is not only appropriate to that subject matter but also happily natural to me.”
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This article was made possible by a grant from the Arts & Science Council.