Born in 1953 in North Hollywood, California and raised in Santa Barbara, Patrick was a shy boy who wanted to be an artist. With no guidance and only misinformation for reference, he floundered. Although a kind high school art teacher mentored him and even let him use his studio, Patrick was afraid to broach the subject of his sexual angst with a heterosexual man.
In 1974, a scholarship to the Santa Barbara Art Institute led him to discover the book 72 Drawings by David Hockney (1971). Here he found an artist who celebrated his sexual persona in his work and who glamorized the "good" gay life in Los Angeles, only 100 miles away. However, when Patrick moved to Hollywood in 1975, he discovered that the good gay life does not exist for poor people, "unless, of course," as he bitterly noted, "they are beautiful."
Patrick, believing that he was sexually unattractive, was hopelessly lonely for the affection of an objectified beautiful boy.
In 1980, in New York City to see the Picasso Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Patrick made a crucial observation of the sexual autobiography inherent in Picasso's work. Thereafter, Patrick began to paint large canvases based on his personal obsession with erotic loneliness. Three major paintings define his milieu: Boys Do Fall in Love (1984), which depicts a strip show; Flame Steaks (1985), which is set in a hustler bar; and The Mysterious Baths (1985), which portrays a gay bath house. On the basis of work such as these canvases, playwright Robert Patrick described Angus as "the Toulouse-Lautrec of Times Square."
However, his subject matter closed off the commercial art market to Patrick; and the bourgeois gay establishment disapproved of his depictions of the politically incorrect "bad" gay life, the demimonde of cruising, hustling, and loneliness. All attempts to exhibit Patrick's work were rebuffed.
In despair that his work would never be accepted by the art establishment, Patrick resigned himself to obscurity and poverty. He found a room in a New York welfare hotel, where he could paint, but he refused to risk more humiliation by attempting to exhibit his work. This reluctance prompted Robert Patrick to introduce this "Emily Dickinson of Painting" through the pages of Christopher Street magazine, the most literate of gay publications in the 1980s. As a result, Patrick's work began to sell. The artist was particularly gratified that David Hockney bought five major paintings.
In the early 1990s, however, still poor and unable to afford a doctor, Patrick collapsed and was diagnosed with AIDS. Facing imminent death, he worried that his life's work would die with him. But in the last months of his life, three one-man shows of his work were mounted. On his death bed in 1992, when he saw the proofs for a book of his paintings, he said, "This is the happiest day of my life."
The artist Patrick Angus didn't have the happiest day of his life until he was on his deathbed, succumbing to aids at thirty-eight in 1992. It was then that he saw the proofs of Strip Show, a book of forty-seven color reproductions of his paintings, and could finally believe that his art would not be completely forgotten. He had worked in obscurity, defeated by early humiliations from galleries that caustically rejected his depictions of sexual loneliness and the "bad" gay culture of hustlers, tricks, and low clubs.
Yet his work always retained a playful wit, a compassionate eye, and a brilliant sense of color and light. Worn down by his failures, Angus gave up hope of exhibiting his paintings, until Robert Patrick wrote an essay about him in Christopher Street. David Hockney bought five of Angus's paintings, and in 1992 three galleries held solo shows, yet without new work the momentum was not sustained. He is included in overviews like Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West and James Saslow's exceptional Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. Much credit is due Douglas Blair Turnbaugh for his steadfast dedication to secure Angus's legacy.
Source: Excerpts from: Douglas Blair Turnbaugh's biography
