A native of Buffalo, Patrick Willett traveled extensively in the American West and settled in Los Angeles before returning to Western NY in the late 70s to raise his family of four children. He currently lives and works in Western New York. He studied conceptual image making at the University at Buffalo and earned his BFA in Graphic Design/Fine Art from Empire State College in 2007. In 2001 he expanded his lifelong art making into a full-time art practice. He is primarily self taught, informed in part by an over 25 year career as an art director and graphic designer.

      Willet has exhibited widely throughout the Western New York area at many galleries. His most recent exhibition “Currents” which was held at Studio Hart was curated by Gerald Mead and accompanied by the following artist’s statement:

cur•rent (ˈkɜr әnt, ˈkʌr-) noun 1. a flowing; flow, as of a river. 2. something that flows, as a stream. 3. the most rapidly moving part of a stream. 4. a portion of a large body of water or mass of air moving in a certain direction.

     This aptly titled exhibition consists of a new body of works on paper by Patrick Willett that represent his efforts to “capture the rhythm of energy that surrounds us in everything we see, hear and touch.” These visually rich works of ink and watercolor were created over the last few years. The artist describes these recent, modestly scaled paintings as having been produced “sometimes under very difficult circumstances - they have also been a therapy of sorts for me.” The inspiration for them relates to natural phenomenon such as “the ancient humming of the cicada, the ebb and flow of the rivers and lakes and the grinding of rock by rapids. These things sustain and heal us while we flow through our lives.”

     The many works that comprise Willett’s Deep Series are simultaneously complex and subtle variations on a theme. These were inspired by a sailboat outing the artist took with an old friend. Collectively they can be viewed as “an animation of the water behind the boat using multiple images. The first image being the reference for the second and so on.”