Sunday 24th June 2018

It must be 3 or 4 years since Royston King began the epic retrospective and posthumous sales of Rudi Patterson’s paintings. The first was at Leighton House, launched by Moira Stewart herself. She said No graphs because she’d been up all night on TV. The work sold like hot cakes: you could see why. It’s decorative, apparently charming and pastoral, the scenes of Jamaica from memory as imagined in a council flat in Notting Hill near Grenfell Tower. Also inexpensive. Further exhibitions followed: Rudi painted and painted. There’s no end to his oeuvre. Then in March of this year, an event took place at the Garden Museum. Talks were given by experts. By the end of an hour, Rudi was… well, something else. The tiny figures in his paintings, the buildings, often churches or possible plantation houses, the flora, the vegetation, almost always in the background the Blue Mountains… what does it all mean? Rudi wasn’t thumping away but there’s a brooding presence, an ambiguity. The blue hills are the unchanging and unchangeable element before which the humans cultivate the land and beautify it with flowers which in some of the pictures appear about to encroach and swamp the humans who are about. The little black figures are doll-like yet in control, going up the drive of the would-be plantation house, now in ownership perhaps. Yet the buildings themselves are flat and sinister with their past. These churches also: what are they like? They have the same silent faintly threatening presence as the houses. Rudi was a supreme painter of flowers and plants: immaculate botanical but with artistry. But something more galvanised Rudi and it’s hard to say exactly what it is. He has advanced into death about five years, growing in significance all the time.

A Rudi: the Longer he is Dead the more Important he Grows

Rudi’s Flowers: See the Lady in the Drive