Today we’d like to introduce you to Patrick Reid O’Brien.
Hi Patrick Reid, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I have been a professional artist and creative entrepreneur for 40 years. I started with a love of drawing, painting, music, writing, and making things from nothing. That creative instinct has guided my whole life.
I studied fine art and painting at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where I learned the discipline behind composition, color, and design. Early in my career, I built a business around personalized vintage pop art, creating artwork for families, collectors, companies, and major events.
Over the years, my work has been connected with national brands and institutions including Margaritaville, the Kentucky Derby, and the White House Historical Association. I also won the Hampton Classic Poster Competition and the Governor’s Cup Poster Competition, which helped bring my work to a wider audience.
A major part of my career has been traveling and exhibiting throughout the country. I have shown my work in more than 50 cities, including New York, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Austin, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC. Those years taught me how people connect emotionally with art, and how a painting can become part of someone’s home, memory, and personal story.
After moving to the Charleston area, I spent several years studying the Lowcountry. The marsh, shrimp boats, harbor, birds, beaches, and coastal light became a new visual language for me. My current work brings together classical composition, impressionistic brushwork, broken color, and the feeling of a place that people love deeply.
Today, I create original paintings, fine art canvas pieces, and limited commissions for collectors who want handmade work with a personal connection to the artist. I still believe the best art is not just something you buy. It is something you live with, remember, and pass through your home as part of your story.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There are many challenges. The cost of doing trade shows to exhibit the art, there is not enough hours in the day to do all the work that you need to do be it social media posting, art creation, follow up with clients, and follow up with production details on special edition print runs, framing, building a booth, and travel time between shows. Sometimes you’re working with a Particular vendor as a art printer or a framer and then they decide that they are going to go out of business or sell their business to somebody else with a different pricing structure and you need to find a new resource to find quality at a great price. The biggest challenge that there is as a visual artist is to create in a voice that says something unique connects with people and is rewarding to paint.
The biggest challenge for me as an artist and any other artist is to get their art in front of the right people and it’s a combination of finding the right shows to do right outlets online In Front of them at the perfect time.
I am always studying I look for new tools and skills to add to my work line, edge color harmony, storytelling, focal point, color temperature. As a professional artist you have to be a lifetime student and be making better paintings every year than you did last year.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
As a professional painter and artist for the last 20 years, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of learning and continuing to grow as an artist. I teach and my specialty is vibrant color coastal impressionism. I was recently asked to judge a competition and it was very similar to the art of teaching while painting at the same time. In order to teach you need to translate into words and descriptions the special nuances and skill sets that are used to build a composition, make the color and value feel can be read as authentic, the words that you choose to illustrate those processes are the same words that you use to evaluate a painting by someone else when you’re deciding who is the winner in a competition. I found one of the most important things that I did when judging the competition was to write down my notes and post them next to the painting to articulate both to the painter and to the visitor to the show why that painting stood out and what was so strong about it. My specialty is impressionism. I paint the scenes of life near the water that bring me joy and have brought me joy for my entire life. I use sophisticated complementary colors to make the light dance and sing so that when you’re 10 feet away from the painting it feels alive and you’re in it, then when you get up on top of the painting you see the brush works the and the graphic gestures that show the road map of how I built that story. I studied and was influenced by the masters Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, John Singer Sartgent, and bold Vincent Vangogh. Beyond the polished and fine softness of the Hudson River valley school of painters I really enjoy the bold expression and choices of personality that you see in impressionism. There is a lot more emotion and for me connection as one human to another telling a story, this is how I see the world.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Luck is everything. Luck is opportunity. You create luck by putting yourself in the path of it. Luck is actually a blessing a gift from the Lord who provides all food for us. I chose to exhibit at a show in New York City where I was discovered by Southern Living who published my work in their magazine. It costs a lot of work and effort to be in New York and close to $6000 to exhibit at the show. People would say I was lucky to be in southern living magazine. It was just opportunity. I was exhibiting at the Grand Strand gift show in Myrtle Beach where I was exhibiting a collection of pop art with words and typography that looked like old vintage signs painted on the side of a barn they were a style that I painted for 20 years called my town art. A woman walked up to my booth and asked me if I could paint lyrics of Jimmy Buffett songs in my art. I said yes I can. Her name was Gina knight and she was the marketing director for Margaritaville Charleston and was the person who began all of the merchandise, T-shirts, branding, all the marketing for Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville. That was lucky again but I had to be at the show for it to happen. The same luck occurred with the Kentucky Derby museum, the White House, the Hotel del Coronado, all lucky breaks that occurred because I took the risk and placed myself in the path of opportunity. The Lord has blessed me in many ways and I consider it a ministry to use the talents he gave me to make beautiful art that makes people smile, it reaffirms how good it is to be alive.
Pricing:
- Giclee on stretched canvas from $189
- Massive 3 panel Giclee on Canvas $1499
- Original Acrylic on Wood Panel 30 x 40 $6900
- Original 24 x 32 $ 5400
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mytownart.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mytownart
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/patrickreidobrien/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@patrickreidobrien3193
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/51syQHeykH4HQyCIPWRPSw
