Patrick Angus
Robert Patrick
Acrylic on canvas
48" x 19"
Collection of LLGAF

Patrick Angus
By Robert Patrick

If you will rent the video, Resident Alien, you will see, about forty-one minutes into it, Quentin Crisp, myself, and Patrick Angus visiting a lower East Side gallery to show its owner some of Patrick’s paintings. You will see further that Patrick was a heart-stoppingly handsome, glowingly attractive youth.

Patrick, however, perceived himself as grotesquely unattractive because when he was growing up in Santa Barbara, a certain older gay male relative never made a pass at him, preferring the area’s abundant beach boys instead. Patrick’s ensuing low self-esteem led to his becoming a passive audient and active purchaser of Manhattan’s young male strippers, a role which gratified his lust and ratified his sense of inferiority. Meanwhile, he was painting exquisite, unemotional still-life’s, portraits, and cityscapes. Aware of their lack of passion, he threatened to abandon painting and leave New York, two thoughts which I could not endure. I harangued him, daring him to put the feelings he had for the strippers into his work. The result was the coarse, gross, great, Material World, which he presented to me with disdainful fingers, swearing not to touch the subject matter again. But the thumb was out of the dike, and soon his complex mix of envy and desire for the adolescent ecdysiasts drove him to create the many canvases of his unique oeuvre, The Times Square Strip-Show. Once he took me along with him to see his models at the tatty, ratty Gaiety Theatre which I of course saw through the lens of his paintings of its performers and patrons. I told him that I felt as if I was visiting the Moulin Rouge with Toulouse Lautrec. He replied that the only resemblance between him and Lautrec was that they were both undesirable monsters. Patrick was never easy with his underground fame which resulted from the Times Square paintings. As a couple of patrons emerged, he was contemptuous of them and himself because they, he was sure, only liked his work for its sexual subject matter. His failure to achieve mainstream attention confirmed in his eyes that he was a second-rater. That other young artists whose work he respected far more than his own also could not find dealers or representation did not alter his low opinion of himself. He was, like many such people, touchy and unpredictable. When I offered to mount a show of his paintings in the lobby at a successful play of mine, he snapped back, “So that’s what you really think of my work. Something to be hung in theatre lobbies?”

When focus could be deflected from his self-estimation, Patrick was the most delightful of conversational companions. As we spent long evenings painting scenery he designed for my productions, we would improvise back-and-forth limericks about artists of all eras. He was a joy to attend a movie or play with, for his rapid, epigrammatic descriptions of them afterward. No one I ever knew had such objective aesthetic judgment, nor was so eager for the aesthetic insights of others. When I, on professional travels around the States, would send him letters detailing the works I saw in galleries and museums, he said I was his eyes.

But when the topic would return to his work, again the cloud of self-loathing would muddy and poison talk.

When he became ill, he told me and other friends that he was seeing doctors and doing as he was told. This turned out, to some extend, to be an outright lie. One can surmise how much of his neglect of available aid was an expression of his self-disdain. The last time I saw him, at the Santa Barbara home of a college teacher of his who had found Patrick in a shocking state and acquired a nurse for him, Patrick was raving and delirious. Not long after that, a New York friend went to Patrick’s home and found him dehydrated and near death under a large painting of boys in Central Park which he had for unknown reasons been removing from a wall. In his last days, as he realized they were his last days, he was greatly comforted by the diligence of Douglas Turnbaugh in promoting him, the compliment of his favorite artist David Hockney purchasing some of his work, and the great joy of both his old school, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the The Leslie-Lohman Gallery presenting shows of his paintings.

When I revisited New York for the first time in some years, I was struck at once by the absence of Patrick’s bright, twinkling eyes from my side, along with his endless invigorating commentary on everything we passed. He saw everything so clearly, so freshly–except himself.