“To become a serious artist…there’s a feeling that you abandon your former self. It’s a decision you suddenly take,” says Richard Patterson, who decided he was going to be a serious artist around the age of 31. Patterson grew up in England and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmith College in London in 1986. In the early 2000s, he moved to America to experience something new. He now lives and works in Dallas, Texas. In much of his work, Patterson combines photography and painting in a unique way. For If, he began with a tiny toy soldier and slathered it with various colors of paint. He then photographed the figurine and painted the image from the photo against a background of theater marquees and city lights. Patterson paints with incredible precision, staying very close to his original photo.

This painting was part of Richard Patterson’s first exhibit in New York City, which consisted of a series of what he calls “soldier paintings.” Patterson describes these paintings of small plastic soldiers covered in paint as “figurative but abstract.” We can tell that there is a figure in the center of the painting, but by covering this figure with layers and layers of paint, Patterson has created a more abstract image. The soldier now appears as a more generalized shape, one that doesn’t seem to represent anything in the real world. Of his soldier paintings, Patterson says, “Somehow they can feel like they sort of hover in space a bit. So I wanted them to feel like hallucinations.”

This soldier is set against a background image of Times Square in New York City, which Patterson copied from a photo taken by his father in the 1970s. He covered the figure with the same colors that are found in the background image.