Charles Patrick

Charles Patrick is best known for his intricately cut butterflies, suspended like museum specimens on individual entomology pins and clustered together to form icons, logos, and symbols against the backdrop of pristine canvases. With a background in vintage poster restoration, illustration, and printmaking, Patrick combines his love of paper, art history, and design to create works of art that are both strikingly beautiful and poignantly thought-provoking.

Living in a world between the paper and digital ages, Patrick’s works conjure feelings of nostalgia for the tactility of paper, created from vintage comic books, children’s books, currency, maps, and other obsolete ephemera. This stands in jarring contrast to the clean, pixelated designs that the butterflies form. Shapes pop from the canvas in three-dimension—a fresh departure from the flat screens that are the norm today.

Patrick lives and works between Cos Cob, Connecticut and Nantucket, Massachusetts.