Patrick Livingstone was born in Lurgan, Ireland, in 1956. He spent his childhood summers in Donegal, in his grandparents' thatched cottage a stone's throw from the Atlantic — a grandfather who lobster-fished those waters, and a coastline that never left him.
He sold his first painting at twelve and spent the money on oil paints.Arriving in London at nineteen, Livingstone found the art schools of the era interested only in abstraction. He taught himself instead — spending years with his face inches from the canvases of the old masters in the National Gallery and the Tate, studying how they built light from nothing. Security guards knew him by name.
That self-directed apprenticeship led to recognition by Christie's Contemporary Art and London Contemporary Art, who published over sixty of his watercolours as limited edition prints — long since sold out. His first major commission was a series of marine paintings for the boardroom of Visa's European Headquarters in Chester, England.
Over fifty years he has moved fluidly between watercolour, bronze sculpture, and hyper-surrealism — exhibiting at Blackman Harvey, the Medici Gallery Mayfair, the Sir John Campbell Gallery Chelsea, and represented in America by Quidley and Company of Boston and Nantucket. Thirty years ago he moved to southwest France, where he lives and works in an old stone house among the vines near Bordeaux.
In 2006, a Sarasota art dealer was arrested for attempting to sell a forged Livingstone to an elderly collector. When told about the forgery, Livingstone's response was characteristically direct:
"There are not many marine artists alive today that can duplicate my work. If they're good enough to duplicate my work, they're good enough to have a fine career as a marine artist in their own right. So why would they?
He is currently at work on Livingstone Editions — a series of ultra-high-end sculptural book editions in hand-carved leather, bronze, and enamel, returning the greatest texts in human history to the physical grandeur they were always meant to have.
HIS PHILOSOPHY
"I let myself play like a child in my work — a child with a strange mixture of naivety and knowing. There is truth and beauty in ambiguity. Please feel free to enjoy any aspect of my work that pleases you, safe in the knowledge that as far as the artist is concerned, there is no right or wrong way to do it."
Patrick Livingstone
Each lettered copy of this Odyssey closes with a leather strap, fastened by a hidden neodymium magnet, and finished with a dichroic glass cabochon set in a hand-made bronze bezel — a jewel that shifts colour with every angle of light.
On the cover, one of ten different hand-made shields, each unique to one of ten characters from the Odyssey. Cast shield frame, gilded in bronze leaf and patinated.
Hand-painted vegetable-tanned natural goatskin. Holow cavity behind the shield filled with earth collected from Ithaca, Troy and Mycenae, visible from inside the book through a sapphire crystal porthole.
24 Lettered copies with the choice of either the Stephen Fry text, or the Robert Fitzgerald translation from everyman's library at €3,500.
75 numbered edition with the Stephen Fry text at €750.
Every copy is unique. The shield, the hand-painted leather, the shield textile, and the painted fore-edge combine differently in every single book across the lettered edition.
Made entirely by hand in one studio. Never repeated.
For enquiries about original works, commissions, or Livingstone Editions — including the forthcoming Odyssey edition launching July 17th — please get in touch.
