Sunday, January 30, 2011

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Everyday Objects

Bedside Bulldog Upside Down

The Bedside Bulldog sculpture works better upside down. Otherwise it looked too much like a table. This was a piece I created after the New Music Sketch. We are doing our first public performance of the New Music Sketch at the Woman's Club of Minneapolis on Feb. 4th. Email me (patrick(at)patrickpryor(dot)com) if you want to participate in the madness as an audience member.



Urchin Pillow Spilling Out

Urchin Pillow torn open. While in New Zealand I experimented with the broken urchin exoskeleton. I used paper to simulate something spilling out of it. The Maori collect the urchins in great quantities and eat the roe. I collected and ate a lot of it while I was visiting. The insides of the urchin spilling out exaggerates the volume of material that actually comes from a single urchin. The pillow indicates preciousness. The piece is about sustenance; inside versus outside; and preciousness. I am still trying to figure out what I am trying to say, and I am quite happy to have discovered how much more impact the piece has now that I've ripped open the pillow.

New Paintings

Red Medium, 36 x 36 inches, acrylic on canvas

Yellow-tailed Squirrel Jockey, 30 x 30 inches, acrylic on canvas
Better images of recent paintings...
More on the website

The Hatchet Story

When we were younger my sister, my mother, and I would travel together. My father never traveled with us. We would go camping as a family of three. My mother was a very brave woman. I can see this clearly now as I look back on these memories as an adult. She was 42 years old when we took our first camping trip to upper Michigan in a tent she’d never set up before. My mother’s friends all thought she was crazy to go into the woods alone with two young children; one nine years old and the other only three years old. But she had good provisions for the trip. Prior to this trip my father had acquired a small tent by using a number of “coupons” from the Chesterfield cigarette company to “buy” the tent. He was an avid smoker.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

The Blue Fish Story

For being 6.5 months pregnant my sister was quite a “trooper” (as my mother would have affectionately called her). While in Tahiti we decided that my mother’s final resting place would be on a “bed” of coral in the reef somewhere. My mother had come to my sister in a dream several weeks earlier and requested this, apparently. The burial reef was the reef near our over-water bungalow on the island of Moorea. It wasn’t quite swimming near – it was more like small outboard motor near, but we didn’t have a motor. We didn’t have a boat either. I was not going to risk swimming that distance with my pregnant sister.

Artist Statement January 2011

Everything I do now is something that I did as a child; only now I do it bigger. When I was a child I would find things that other people were throwing out and I would build other things out of them. When I found bones in the woods I would collect them, when I found bugs I would collect them, and of course when I found a baby raccoon I kept it as a pet. I did not care for normal toys; I would rather try to revive store-bought chicken hearts with batteries and re-assemble their skeletons after dinner.

I work with abstract yet recognizable forms that are familiar, conjure memories, or hold power. I find myself drawn to physical structure, and I am interested in spontaneous immediate compositions, as I have no patience for anything requiring tediousness. I use play to generate ideas with humor, beauty, and madness.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011


Pepé
20 x 24 inches








Yellow-tailed Squirrel Jockey
30 x 30 inches




















Like a Bob Dylan Song
24 x 24 inches each













The New Year 2011
24 x 24 inches each







Ice Cream for Breakfast
36 x 36 inches








The Seduction of Europa
36 x 60 inches