Patrick is no longer with us. He is irreplaceably gone. A great
and noble figure, yet deliberately, unavoidably human. Whether in
his beautiful lithographs of the Ganges, or his grand paintings
of an unfamiliar, wintry Venice, his works were supremely life-enhancing.
‘Towers of Silence over there, Michael’ looked across
the Ganges to great ruins. He and this writer shared aspects of
silence, he from a great height. Often his work contained the unanswerable
question: why? These were subtle, enigmatic works, built on human
vulnerability and yet, like their author, curiously robust when
challenged. This was Patrick’s inner life, often that of a child,
all in wonderment. There cannot for decades have been as obstreperous
a Royal Academician as Patrick, breaking (so to speak) the toys
of more sedate members, not just attention seeking but pulling the
big boys down a peg or two.
