Notes on Solipsis

I have been primarily occupied for the past twenty years or so as a visual artist. My paintings, which could be described as abstract landscapes, are a good metaphor of my parallel interest in musical composition. Both my paintings and musical compositions are the result of a very intuitive and improvisational process of give-and-take. At a certain point in this process, an idea begins to assert itself that is then embellished upon and refined. Neither the paintings nor the musical compositions, however, are without structure. Just as the paintings derive from the landscape, so the songs are structured in a traditional jazz format. My various experiments and experiences over the years with many musical genres and instruments have, at the very least, provided a lot of grist for my artistic mill. And since I felt that I needed the time and the freedom to sort through my ideas at my own pace, I thought it important to play the various instruments myself. This imposed some rather serious limitations on both the compositions and the performances since I am certainly not a “multi-instrumentalist” in a true sense. The intended result was simplicity. As I have been wandering this musical landscape trying to find my voice, it seems that I have come to precisely where I would have wanted to be had I known where I was going at the beginning. Perhaps “all who wander are not lost.”

Current Music Projects

Patrick is working on a composition for symphony orchestra, and a group of string quartets for a documentary on the life of contemporary Russian iconographer, Xenia Prokovsky.