Patrick Oates is an Australian painter based in the Clarence Valley region of New South Wales. Born in Mackay, Central Queensland, he has been painting from an early age and completed a Diploma of Visual Art at Southbank Institute of Technology in 2013. Oates has exhibited with emerging and established galleries in Australia, America and Canada, developing a body of work that brings together contemporary landscape and figurative imagery.
Working primarily at night or within imagined twilight spaces, his paintings explore memory, distance, and the emotional charge of place. Drawing on rural landscapes, family folklore, and personal observation, Oates often depicts figures and animals moving through open terrain, suggesting quiet journeys, inherited stories, and moments of light that sit just beyond reach. His work approaches landscape less as a fixed location and more as a psychological or remembered space, where myth and lived experience gently overlap.