Meet Tyrone Patkoski: formerly homeless, his pieces incorporating found objects have captured the attention of the local art world Tyrone Patkoski doesn’t say much – but his art speaks volumes. The half-Native American, half-Polish Tacoma man, who has spent much of his 59 years homeless and reclusive, makes art from trash, drawing and painting his life on the street and the complexity in his own mind. Now Patkoski has been discovered by the local art world, his work framed and on display at Tacoma Art Supply. It’s an exhibition that not only gives the artist income and recognition, but gives the rest of us a glimpse into Patkoski’s world.
“I met Tyrone when his sister brought him into the center 20 years ago,” says Joan Staples-Baum, program manager for the Tahoma Urban Indian Center downtown. “He started coming in when he was hungry, or wanted bread to feed [local stray] animals.”
Patkoski also started bringing in art. Homeless, he was afraid the drawings he’d been making on discarded manila folders and bakery boxes would be “beaten up” by people who followed him on the street. Staples-Baum has been storing art for him ever since.
“It’s incredible stuff,” says Staples-Baum, who occasionally displays the work on the Center’s walls. “I’m no expert, but it really attracted me.”
Fast-forward to early this year, when Staples-Baum met former News Tribune photographer Casey Madison through a social justice workshop. He met Patkoski and admired his work, encouraging Staples-Baum to frame it. After securing a local business grant she took the work to Tacoma Art Supply, where framer Glenn Leonard fell in love with it. The result is the exhibition up now through May: Patkoski’s first-ever public recognition of his art.
The TAS show is big, with work from the last decade. Patkoski’s oils are heavily layered, using complex, asymmetrical geometries and various symbols drawn from his personal life – guitarists (he plays a mean jazz guitar, says Staples-Baum), Indian frogs and wolves, fish skeletons. Many of the paintings are framed with highly-decorated found objects – shells, rose thorns, bamboo, bottle caps – often significant only if you know the personal story behind them.
“This is the Terminator Bug,” says Patkoski, pointing to a found-object sculpture of huge insects that looks like a set from “Alice in Wonderland.” Tall and broad, with graying black hair and full beard, the artist is almost painfully shy, retreating into a nervous chuckle when he can’t find words.
“I got a bunch of beads from a friend to make that.” Patkoski points to another sculpture, strewn with cigarette packets and bottles. “This is the Gambler Bug: He drinks, smokes, chews gum. And here, this is my fingernail, where it fell off once.” It’s there, sure enough, almost painted into the canvas. Another new work features two disposable razors, saved from when a friend gave him a packet to “clean himself up with.”
The paintings at TAS are hugely different from the early cartoon drawings stacked up at the Indian Center. There, scary skeletons with demonic grins inject needles into decapitated heads, while walking telephones brandish guns and more needles, and tiny people crawl desperately up the picture frame and fall off. There are dark jokes, like a rock band with curly bodies like music notes playing to an audience of tombstone-shaped toes. There’s dog-poop humor. Faces are wild, and the background – like that of the paintings – is overflowing with detail, from syllables repeating across the page to geometric shapes. This is dark stuff, and if you look hard enough, you can see echoes of it in the paintings: a fish skeleton, a tormented shadow-person, a man despairing in a corner as his house burns. Yet over the years the paintings get lighter – a sign, thinks Staples-Baum, of healing.
Piecing together the puzzle behind these images – Patkoski himself – is challenging. After growing up near Sea-Tac where, as his sister Naomi remembers, he drew over every inch of his bedroom walls, he moved out to Fife and lost touch with family. Some of that time he was living in a school bus by the river; he also earned the nickname of “The Dog Man” from all the stray animals he looked after. He had a couple of jobs, learned a bit about art from magazines he’d found in Dumpsters. The rest is cloudy – “No one actually knows what Tyrone went through when he was homeless,” says friend and neighbor John Parizo – until he started living in his car on the McKinley-area property of a close friend. Making art in the garage, trawling the Hilltop for trash, and dodging gang members who he says were after him, Patkoski continued this way until last year, when the friend died and left him the house.
Now, at least, he has a living room to paint in, but he’s still relying on leftover paint, recycled canvases and the good will of friends. In addition, he’s having to deal with repeated neighbor complaints to the city requesting he clean up his yard. He’s had a doctor mention schizophrenia, but neither he nor Staples-Baum agree. He’s never done drugs, but it’s clear from his drawings the horror he’s seen of people who do. According to Staples-Baum, Patkoski’s a healthy, even picky eater, but he’ll turn up at the Indian Center with no money for food, saying he’s given it away to hungry people in Haiti. And although his mother was Native American, he only just recently enrolled in the Tulalip tribe.
It’s a hard, complex story that’s borne out by the solemn, slightly uneven eyes staring out of the self-portrait on the walls at Tacoma Art Supply. Patkoski’s clothes are worn and dirty, his manner nervous and shy. What’s clear, though, from talking with Patkoski and his friends, is what’s inside this outsider artist.
“He’s a really gentle soul,” says Parizo, who’s known Patkoski for 20 years. “But he’s odd. He gets into trouble because he doesn’t think through how people will think of him.”
Staples-Baum agrees. “Tyrone is rough around the edges, but he’s just a gentle giant.”
And for Patkoski himself, who is suddenly earning enough money from art to buy food and bike parts, what’s important is stability.
“I just hope I can find a safer place to live,” he says. “Then I can quit worrying.”
Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568
rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com
IF YOU GO
What: Outside art by Tyrone Patkoski
Where: Tacoma Art Supply, 1552 Commerce St., No. 101, Tacoma
When: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdaysa through May 31; ArtWalk reception 5-8 p.m. May 20
Cost: Free
Photo gallery: www.caseymadison.com/personal/tyrone/
Information: 253-444-2341, www.tacomaartsupply.com, www.tyronepatkoski.com
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