James D. Watts Jr.
Tulsa World Scene Reporter
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For a long time, Tulsa artist Patrick Gordon kept his head in a drawer.
It was a practice that started in 1977, not long after the Philbrook Museum of Art had hosted the first major exhibit of Gordon’s work.
That exhibit featured a mannequin of Gordon sitting on a couch, in a pose similar to a self-portrait that was part of the show. An artist named Andy Trompetter created the life mask from which the mannequin’s head was fashioned.
“He was a wonderful sculptor, and he knew how to make life casts,” Gordon recalled. “I can still remember having that stuff slathered all over my face, with two straws sticking out from my nose so I could breathe. It gets real hot under there, and then all of a sudden it turns very cold. That’s when you know it’s time to take it off.
“I ended up keeping (the head) in a drawer for years, where it just rolled around with all the other stuff I had in there,” he said.
Gordon has collected a great deal of unusual, interesting and whimsical things, many of which have appeared in the 900 or so paintings he has completed during his career. Some of those objects, along with other items such as books on favorite artists and small paintings by his mother, fill a wall-sized shelving unit in one of the rooms of the Helmerich Exhibition Hall at the Philbrook Museum of Art.
It’s part of a massive retrospective of Gordon’s work, spanning more than 50 years, from a small pencil drawing of his family’s dog made when he was 5 years old to a painting on which he will be working throughout the run of “Wall Flowers: Patrick Gordon Paintings,” which opens Wednesday, Sept. 24, at the museum.
That’s also the first day that Gordon plans to be at the easel set up in the Philbrook exhibit space, working on the new painting. He plans to begin work around 1:30 p.m. and continue for about an hour and a half.
“Or it could be longer,” he said. “I’m not sure I can get a whole lot done in just 90 minutes.”
The image of a vase filled with flowers is not, strictly speaking, a new work.
“I had done this painting a few years ago, and I wanted to have it in the show,” Gordon said. “But the client who owns it didn’t want to lend it. So I thought, ‘OK, I’ll just paint a new one.’ So that’s what I’ll be doing.”
The Philbrook installation staff moved the easel usually set up in the front room of Gordon’s Maple Ridge home to the museum, along with all the accoutrements necessary for him to do his work, from the glass palette that Gordon has used for years to the flat-screen TV on which to play his favorite shows as he works.
“Yes, we won’t have a Patrick Gordon mannequin in this show,” said Susan Green, the museum’s Marcia Manhart Endowed Associate Curator for Contemporary Art and Design. “But that’s because we are going to have the real Patrick Gordon as part of this exhibit. Well, some of the time.”
Gordon will be spending a couple of days a week in the exhibit to work on the painting. He has no timeline for when he’ll finish the work. “It’s like having babies,” he said. “You can plan, but it’s going to happen when it’s going to happen.”
“Wall Flowers: Patrick Gordon Paintings” is the first retrospective of this acclaimed Tulsa artist’s work, with more than 50 of the large-scale watercolor and oil paintings for which Gordon is best known. The exhibit will feature elaborate still-life paintings filled with flowers, tchotchkes that Gordon has collected through the years and gigantic images of flowers that give the exhibit its somewhat tongue-in-cheek title.
“That was something the museum staff came up with,” Gordon said. “I laughed when they told me, because of all the things I could be, a wallflower I’m not. But when you get down to it, a lot of my paintings are of flowers you hang on a wall, so it’s an accurate title.”
Green said: “A lot of Patrick’s titles for his paintings contain puns, and we wanted to reflect that. Because these are wall flowers that really stand out. The large paintings — I call them ‘stunners’ — are so overwhelming that you can almost inhale the aroma of the roses, the peonies or the lilies.”
Green said that one sees in Gordon’s work the influence of Johannes Vermeer and Dutch artists in the 16th and 17th centuries — who created and perfected the still-life as medium of both artistic technique and personal expression — as well as artists such as J.M.W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, Marc Chagall and Andrew Wyeth.
“But what has always set Patrick’s paintings apart, and what makes them so fascinating, is the incredible attention to detail in everything he does, the richness of color in his paintings, and his sense of humor,” Green said.
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She added that Gordon’s work explores ideas of identity and the idea that the things with which we choose to surround ourselves with can say a lot about who we are.
It’s why Gordon himself refers to the still-life works he has created as “portraits,” as they are filled with objects that carry significant, if not immediately obvious, meaning about the subject.
“When we visited Pat at his home, we realized that his home is something of still life in and of itself,” Green said. “We wanted to transform the gallery into a still life, and that included taking objects from Pat’s house. Our incredible crew boxed up everything shelf by shelf and then replicated them here in the gallery.”
When asked how Gordon felt about having empty shelves in his house, he replied, “Oh, I just started opening up drawers and filling them back up again.”
The exhibit includes a number of images that were used as posters for events such as Mayfest and the Tulsa Centennial Celebration, as well as paintings that are part of public collections, such as “Andante’s Inferno,” which usually is on display at the Tulsa PAC.
“We wanted to include some of the paintings that were made into posters because they are a reflection of how much Pat has given back to the Tulsa community,” Green said. “But they are also images that thousands of people know well because they have these posters on display in their homes.”
A native of Claremore, Gordon began drawing and painting at a young age. “Wall Flowers” includes two of his earliest surviving works: drawings of the Gordon family dog, made when he was 5 years old, and of a rough-hewn building on a lake shore.
“My father would take me and my three brothers fishing,” Gordon recalled. “And I hated it. So I sat in the front of the boat, where there was this flat place where I could draw. That was the building I saw from the boat.”
He paused for a moment, then said: “I have no idea why my mother kept these things. I mean, I was the youngest of four boys — you’d think she would have kind of given up on saving things. But I glad she saved these.”
Gordon graduated from the University of Tulsa in 1974 and quickly established himself as a working artist. The Philbrook show includes a good many of his portraits: personal ones of family members, commissions to capture children and adults in watercolor and oil, and depictions of former Tulsa World co-owner Roxana Lorton and former Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor, shown behind the wheel of a classic Ford convertible.
The exhibit also includes some paintings from Gordon’s “Mrs. Lennox” series of larger-than-life portraits of men dressed in lavish ball gowns. Gordon created this series in the 1990s while living in New York City; in 2016, Living Arts of Tulsa hosted the first-ever showing of the complete series.
“That was a stunning, absolutely stunning show,” Green said, “and we are very lucky to be able to have five of them in the show. Patrick has captured these men so wonderfully — you can see the life in these men’s faces, the stories that their lives contain. The people who lent us these paintings were very honored that we asked to include them.”
Gordon took his first tour of the exhibition last week, as the museum’s team of installers were putting the finishing touches on the displays, in advance of a weekend of preview events. In many instances, it was the first time he had seen many of the paintings in years.
“Unlike a lot of artists, I never kept track of how many paintings I made. It was something I just wasn’t interested in, really, until this came up,” he said. “And then I had to think about it, so I hired an assistant to help me go through my computer and find images. I was shocked at the number we finally came up with, which was around 900 paintings.
“It seems like a lot, but then I thought, well, I might do 10 or 12 paintings a year. And over time, it all adds up,” Gordon said. He laughed, then added: “I mean, it’s been nearly 50 years since I did my first show here, and I know I don’t look old enough to have been here 50 years ago. I just find that astounding.”
The word “retrospective” often is used to indicate a career being capped off, but that isn’t the case with Gordon.
“I’m already trying something new,” he said. “I’ve been working with large canvases for some time, and I have to admit, moving a 5-foot-by-7-feet canvas around isn’t something I can do by myself anymore. I’m working on a study of two figures on a smaller canvas, about 20-by-20 (inches). So I’m going back to working on a smaller scale. But I did just put in an order for some big watercolor paper, just in case I want to do something for fun.
“I still paint every day,” Gordon said. “I’m the luckiest human being I know, because I get to stay at home and work.
“I have no sense of ‘retirement,’” he said. “I see people who have retired, and I have to say, they don’t look very happy. But I am happy. I get up every morning and walk into the room with my easel and my brushes, turn on the TV, sit down and say, ‘OK, where were we?” And that’s what I’m gonna do until the day I drop dead.”
james.watts@tulsaworld.com
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James D. Watts Jr.
Tulsa World Scene Reporter
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