As Shakespeare wrote: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The same can be said for Tulsa’s own Patrick Gordon. You may know him as Pat, Patrick, or p.s. — or the name may be new to you — but his brilliant, luminous paintings carry a powerful impact and have been favorites in the Tulsa community for more than 40 years.
Born in Claremore in 1953, Gordon hosted his own art exhibit and sold his first painting for $60 at age twelve. He was barely out of his teens when he began exhibiting at prestigious galleries in New York City. Today, working ten hours a day, every day of the week, Gordon creates beauty in his home studio in Tulsa. While he is anything but a wallflower, the paintings that he has created over the last fifty years will grace the Helmerich Gallery in the Philbrook exhibition Wall Flowers: Patrick Gordon Paintings.
Walk through the exhibition, and you will discover towers of roses, a giant tulip and huge, lush peonies; sensitive portraits; delicate shading that takes your breath away; and knock-out still life paintings full of surprising objects: a feather, chair, marble, or model of the Statue of Liberty. These objects are not simple knickknacks; they fill Gordon’s paintings with symbolic meaning.
In Gordon’s artwork, beauty is more than a surface layer — it becomes the structure. His paintings are composed with such precise attention to flowers, textiles and ornament that, rather than simply frame the subjects, these lush environments build an emotional architecture around them. A wallpaper backdrop, a saturated bloom, the gentle tilt of a head — all are deliberate gestures of care and presence. Gordon constructs spaces where stillness conveys feeling and where beauty, with such structural resonance, moves beyond the painting to deeply affect the viewer.
This approach places Gordon in dialogue with traditions of still life and portraiture stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age, where arrangements of flowers, fruit and objects were rich with allegorical meaning. Gordon, like his predecessors, uses this iconographic language to express what cannot always be said outright or is more powerful using a visual language. His portraits and still lifes blur the line between object and subject, body and bouquet, challenging rigid genre hierarchies. In his self-portrait Fried Green Tomatoes (1993), Gordon assembles flowers and objects that have deep personal meaning. While the painting in itself is a masterful watercolor and stunning still life, its power lies in the symbolic meaning of each object. We can appreciate each item as exquisite, but we can never fully grasp the references to memories, beloved family and friends, or other evocative significances that the objects hold for Gordon himself.
Gordon has created a home studio, which itself is like a still life, and the exhibition will include a portion of his working studio, relocated into the gallery. Not only will visitors be able to explore the creative space in which he works, Gordon will be regularly creating within the exhibition, and visitors can glimpse the artist’s creative process.
Wall Flowers: Patrick Gordon Paintings opens September 24 at Philbrook Museum of Art. Visit philbrook.org for more details.
