Pat Alderson is an oil painter and frame maker whose work explores home, neighborhood, and the changing nature of community through imagined places built from the architecture of real ones.
Alderson’s connection to painting began early. His father was an oil painter and built him a small easel as a child, introducing him to the medium that would eventually become central to his own practice. Although he never formally studied art, Alderson developed his practice independently, beginning to paint seriously in his late fifties after a career leading sales for scientific publishers. That career took him to cities throughout the United States and abroad, and he made a habit of visiting art museums whenever his travels allowed. Today, he regularly visits museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Clark Art Institute, Yale University Art Gallery, and Harvard Art Museums.
Alderson is drawn to small American cities and towns that are often overlooked—particularly older factory towns shaped by mills, factories, apartment buildings, and modest residential neighborhoods. He photographs constantly, often noticing an unexpected view from a car window or encountering an intriguing arrangement of gables, porches, rooftops, and industrial buildings while walking through an older neighborhood. These observations become source material rather than literal subjects.
Working primarily in oil on linen, Alderson reorganizes these architectural fragments into invented communities. Houses, apartment buildings, factories, windows, rooftops, and trees are compressed, stacked, and interlocked within a single composition. Perspective is deliberately altered, allowing multiple viewpoints to coexist. The resulting neighborhoods feel familiar but impossible—part observation, part memory, part imagined map.
Although architecture is the visible subject, the buildings also serve as a way for Alderson to think about his own relationship to community. He is drawn to the remnants of neighborhoods where people once lived close to their work and naturally encountered one another in the course of everyday life. In many older factory towns today, those streets can feel remarkably quiet. The paintings emerge from that tension: they are colorful, inviting, and full of the visual suggestion of community, while also carrying a sense of solitude and disconnection. As Alderson has grown older, he has found himself less connected to community while becoming increasingly nostalgic for it. The imagined neighborhoods in his paintings occupy that space between belonging and being alone.
Alderson also builds his own stretchers and frames. His long-standing experience using power tools to build furniture and garden structures naturally led to making these elements of his paintings himself. Inspired by the framing traditions of twentieth-century American painters, he considers the frame part of the personality of each work, adjusting its proportions, wood, and finish to complement the painting. He prefers square formats and makes his own stretchers when the dimensions he wants are not commercially available. The process slows him down and provides an opportunity to think about the painting before it begins.
His artistic influences include Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Egon Schiele, Alice Neel, and Agnes Martin.