Patrick Joseph
Summer 2010 Feature chARTist
Art’s Buddy System, chARTist Patrick Joseph and his Cat Buddy Painting a Picture of Artistic Success
chARTist Patrick Joseph and his cat Buddy turn heads in public and are headed for destined success in creative expression.
“When I paint or draw, Buddy will gravitate to me, lay on the canvases and give me love. He motivates me to paint. He doesn’t show the same behaviors when I play the guitar or other art forms,” said Joseph, who affectionately refers to Buddy the cat as his son.
The duo learned to communicate well during hurricanes in Miami when Joseph was in graduate school. After a week of hide and seek and playing, Buddy shakes hands, does high fives, stays, hugs, walks on a leash and even paints.
Joseph holds a Masters of Fine Art in Computer Animation from Digital Media Arts College in Boca Raton and Bachelors of Arts degrees in both Graphic Design and 2 Dimensional Design from Miami International University. Joseph is a 3D artist, a 2D graphic and motion artist and now a chARTist creating for chART! His paintings convey his intense depth of art education and experience and his efflorescent presence.
“I can feel and sense energy. I am open and observant. I communicate my truth with my art. When I see something that catches my eye, I record it in my mind so I can create it through an art form. As a graduate student studying 3D art 16 hours a day, I didn’t see the sun for two years. In my dreams my subconscious would see the sun rise to remind me to appreciate the day,” recalled Joseph.
The handsome well read Renaissance Man vacillates between sounding like a rocket scientist at Cape Canaveral and Deepak Chopra and looks like his super model brother. He is captivating and charming and as much full of pleasant surprises as his art.
“I never meant to be an artist. I love numbers. In high school, I loved calculus. I have had over 40 jobs, doing 4 to 5 at a time. I am a scientist, a mathematician, an inventor and an artist,” said Joseph.
Joseph, at 31-years-old, rivals achievements of those retiring at twice his age. Among other projects, he rebranded the Fox TV station in Palm Beach, created a Flash GI Joe internet video game, and most recently created the graphics for Tremor, a core audio mixer iPhone app that allows the user to stream music from the internet or other sources and DJ it.
“The iPhone app makes me feel trendy and current as an artist. The Mac was created by an artist, you know,” said Joseph.
Tremor iPhone app graphics created by Patrick Joseph
He also composes music, often while multitasking. During his college years, with his parents still in Michigan, Joseph would regularly visit his grandparents three hours away in mid-Florida.
“I’d drive down 27 with a tape recorder, acoustic guitar and harmonica and play, sing and compose music and drive with my knees,” said Joseph.
When he’s not creating himself, he’s teaching people to create at South Florida’s colleges and universities where Buddy started as the model for the figure drawing class and now attends for fun as part of the instruction for a wide variety of courses. Joseph teaches at the graduate level for 3D Computer Animation, Graphic Design, Fine Art History, and Motion Capture Green Screen courses. Undergraduate courses include Commercial Packaging Design, Media Illustration, Digital Painting and Texturing, Advanced Typography, Video Editing Audio for Electronic Media and more.
Between working, creating and teaching, Joseph created visual art as gifts for friends and for a few fine art galleries.
This classic overachiever multitasker defines his goals for his paintings as, “making art that people enjoy as much as I enjoyed making it and for some of the money to go towards helping others.” When his co-worker at WFLX and fellow fine artist Kathie Kreh connected him with chART “it just clicked.”
“I love the whole concept and approach to getting original art out to the world. I have been in a few galleries and most of them wanted me to make reproduction of things so they can sell more, which to me personally as an artist in this point of my career I find it insulting. I like making my art, a one of a kind and giving it to people. Everyone who knows me, loves my work, the problem is that I have never had any talent for getting it out there to the public to see. Now the one aspect I like about this Charity Art concept is the charity part. I thought about having Buddy do pet therapy. Every day in the past few years I’ve read the Bible to find out just how good my life is and I’ve been wanting to give to charity. So the fact that charity gets money from any art I would potentially sell, is the clincher for me,” said Joseph.
When the price tags from the previous art gallery were peeled off and the much lower chART charity art prices put on, chART explained to Joseph that at two hour events, to sell volumes of art, chART prices the art competitively.
“When I took my roommate’s cat in Miami, I had $5 to buy cat food and nothing for myself. It was the first time in my life I had to care for someone else. I’ll always have enough money somehow,” said Joseph.
Buddy the cat did teach Patrick Joseph the Buddy System, the concept that chART is founded upon, that as creative people, promoters, patrons, a community, and one special cat, we all are better with each other.
“And lastly the stuff THAT I LOVE, I call it “NOTHING ART” mostly because I didn’t like what my art teachers taught me of what art is suppose to be. I didn’t like following rules, and I figured my style was so different that if it’s not art then it’s nothing. It’s an extremely detail oriented style. It started from just black and white, the to color, then I modified different styles or versions of the style, brought it to clothing, shirts, pants, shoes, glass, mirrors. One painting is 8 foot by 6 foot and has a chair painted with the design so that if someone were to sit in the chair, an observer from behind would view the other person as in the painting. Some I have made to walk on, and otherwise experience. This style is me, I love people to get into my art, and explore their own subconscious, which basically it’s a subconscious style of art. I actually one semester as a Professor of Art taught “Nothing Art” too, so now I have a few former students who have been so inspired by this style that they have matured what they were taught into their own versions of “Nothing Art”. This style is almost 80 percent about the process and 20 percent about the final product, but in the end the finished pieces are so unique because of the process commitment that the last 20 percent is done with great ease.”
– chARTist Patrick Joseph
