Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is a reclusive artist who's work taught the world more about life in the dark corners of the gay world during the 1980s. His work captured, with sympathy, understanding, and wit, the longing and loneliness of many urban gay men of the time. Today's Out Spotlight is realist painter Patrick Angus.

Patrick Angus was born in North Hollywood, California on December 3, 1953 and grew up in Santa Barbara a shy kid who dreamed of being an artist. Without any formal teaching and only misinformation for reference, he struggled. It was in high school that a kind art teacher mentored him and let him use his studio, where he began to flourish. As a teen Angus was afraid to broach the subject of his sexuality with anyone.

Going on to attend the Santa Barbara Art Institute, he first felt comfortable expressing the subject matter he most cared about - his friend and the gay subculture he was a part of until he discovered the drawings of fellow artist David Hockney in the early 1970s. Especially works by Hockney painted about gay life that Angus' artistic inspiration. Angus moved to Hollywood in 1975, and discovered the world of beautiful men yet always felt he was on the fringe and not attractive enough to be apart of the Hollywood scene.

In 1974, Angus attended Santa Barbara Art Institute on scholarship. It was there that he first felt comfortable to express the subject that he most cared about his life and friends in the then gay still somewhat subculture of the early 1970's. While in school he discovered the book 72 Drawings by David Hockney and he found an artist who celebrated his sexual persona in his work and who glamorized the "good" gay life in Los Angeles, only 100 miles away.

However, when Angus moved to Hollywood in 1975, he discovered that the good gay life does not exist for poor people, "unless, of course," as he bitterly noted, "they are beautiful." Angus, believing that he was sexually unattractive, was hopelessly lonely for the affection of an objectified beautiful boy and found himself in the fringes of the scene.

American realist artist Patrick Angus produced keenly observed and compassionate depictions of the 1980s gay demimonde. His work captures, with sympathy, understanding, and wit, the longing and loneliness of many urban gay men of the era.

Growing up when figurative painting was out of vogue to the art establishment, he had his preference was strengthened through his friendship with other "realist" artists who agreed with his view that an art dependent on observation was more interesting than concept ar." A great draftsman, with a keen eye for detail, Angus made portraits of friends and recorded with Hockney-like wit the Los Angeles scene around him that evading him, with his overtly gay subject matter.

He "specialized" in paintings that depicted the darkened movie houses and the baths, the atmosphere that he found enticing but beyond his participation.

In 1980 he traveled to New York to see the Picasso Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Angus made a crucial observation of the sexual autobiography inherent in Picasso's work. He declared that "Picasso demonstrated that anything [including orgasm] can be depicted--Picasso is the ultimate realist." He stayed in New York and it was here that his talent flourished. He began to paint large canvases based on his personal obsession with erotic loneliness. Three major paintings define his milieu: Boys Do Fall in Love (1984), which depicts a strip show; Flame Steaks (1985), which is set in a hustler bar; and The Mysterious Baths (1985), which portrays a gay bath house. His work during the time was mainly focused strip shows, hustler bars, bath houses, but included portraits - especially one of one of his admirers and promoters, Quentin Crisp.

From his work at the time playwright Robert Patrick described Angus as "the Toulouse-Lautrec of Times Square."

He also created a number of oil or acrylic paintings of the interior of the Gaiety Theater and some of its dancers and customers in the 1980s, including Grand Finale (1985), The Apollo Room I (1986), Remember the Promise You Made (1986), Slave to the Rhythm (1986), All The Love in the World (1987), Hanky Panky (1991)

A recluse, Angus considered his work to be not commercial and remained hidden away in his apartment for the most part, creating paintings he knew would never sell. His subject matter closed off the commercial art market to Angus. The "bourgeois gay establishment disapproved of his depictions of the politically incorrect "bad" gay life, the demimonde of cruising, hustling, and loneliness." All attempts to exhibit Angus' work were rebuffed.

In despair knowing his work would never be accepted by the art establishment, Angus resigned himself to obscurity and poverty. He found a room in a New York welfare hotel, where he could paint, but he refused to risk more humiliation by attempting to exhibit his work. This reluctance prompted Robert Patrick to introduce this "Emily Dickinson of Painting" through the pages of Christopher Street magazine, the most literate of gay publications in the 1980s. As a result, there was interest in his work.

The man who inspired him, David Hockney himself, bought five major paintings. Quentin Crisp wrote, "Mr. Hockney has said that he paints what he likes to look at. No wonder he has bought several of Mr. Angus's paintings. Mr. Angus works on the same principle and, although at first sight, his pictures seem so deliberately shameless, he is really, in this respect, in a direct line of descent from artists such as Mr. Manet, whose picture of Olympia was, in its day, considered so shocking."

In the early 1990s, just as his work was becoming 'collectable', however still poor and unable to afford a doctor, he collapsed and was diagnosed with AIDS. Facing death, he worried that his life's work would die with him. But in the last months of his life, three one-man shows of his work were mounted and book of his work, Strip Show, was coming together. On his death bed in 1992, when he saw the proofs for the book and said, "This is the happiest day of my life."

Patrick Angus captured a unique aspect of gay life that few have either experienced or are willing to admit. His keenly observed images of the gay underclass of the 1980s are a major contribution to the legacy of American social realism as much like the work of such artists as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, and Paul Cadmus. Moreover, they are unique in the history of art for their compassionate depiction of the longing and loneliness of some urban gay men.