Patrick Webb

Patrick Webb continues to create a series of oil paintings fashioning his contemporary “Everyman” from the Punchinello who appeared as a stock figure in seventeenth century Italian commedia dell’arte. Webb has said that his first Punchinello canvases allowed him “to probe the horror of the AIDS epidemic”, but the painter then discovered that his tragicomic clown refused to die. No matter what adventure or trial Punchinello is thrown into – parade, gym, rodeo, fire, brawl, Punchinello continues to surprise with his unique combination of strangeness and familiarity. Most recently Webb has been painting the bonfires found on Cape Cod’s magical beaches. Equipped with pochade and spelunking light strapped to his forehead, Webb sketched the fires and the families that surrounded them and the inky dark of the sky, sea and sand. These paintings explore kinds of light and the expressive implications of those worlds as well as the mysterious dark from which Punchinello, his world, stories and desires emerge.