“Promise” is a great thing.  It’s the future—the future of art and the future of hope for civilization.  If you think that’s too dramatic, you just have to look at the work of Patrick Campbell, a 17-year-old student at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.  He was following his four older brothers, all graduates of Duke Ellington, into the arts when he suffered a stroke three years ago.  The struggle to recover and continue on for Patrick and his parents has been Herculean, but there has never been a doubt that he could not only recover, but excel and accomplish whatever he wishes.

If it has meant endless hours of grueling physical and speech therapy while fighting incomprehensible city bureaucracy, so be it.  If it meant auditing classes and accomplishing work on his own, so be it.  And if it means learning how to draw and paint with the left hand rather than right, then that’s what it takes.

Patrick doesn’t speak of any of this.  He just opens up his art portfolio like any other graduating senior applying to colleges and art schools and lets his work do the talking.  It includes the whole inventory of techniques taught in art curriculums: pencil drawings, monotype prints, watercolors, rubbings, acrylics, etc., and it is very good.  He has a good grasp of space and how patterns of lights and darks create solids.  He has an innate sense of composition and how the arrangement of form tells the story.

But there is something else you can’t help but notice, especially when you look at his portraits.  There is a love of creating art and a sensitivity to life that looks into the future, the great gaping unknown, with a determination to find the best—the beauty of the world and the beauty of life.