Patrick Oates’s paintings move between landscape, figures and animals, focusing on belonging, distance, and the emotional charge of place. Set within open terrain at dusk and after dark, they suggest quiet journeys, inherited stories, and the gap between what is passed down and what gets imagined around it. Oates approaches landscape less as a fixed location and more as a psychological space, where myth and lived experience overlap.
Born in Mackay, Central Queensland, Oates is based in the Clarence Valley, New South Wales. He completed a Diploma of Visual Art at Southbank Institute of Technology in 2013 and has since exhibited with galleries across Australia, America and Canada.