Patrick Okrasinski was born in New York City in 1996. His academic training began in 2016, when he enrolled at the Florence Academy of Art US. There he was able to study figurative painting at the highest level while pursuing his interest in painting the landscape en plein air in his spare time. As a student he won numerous awards for his figure paintings and still life.
In 2019, he was awarded an Artist Residency in Giverny, France, thanks to the Munn Artists Program through the Versailles Foundation Inc and Claude Monet Foundation. For three months he painted in Monet’s Gardens and the surrounding countryside, a popular artist colony for American Impressionists in the 19th century. In 2020 he won the prestigious Donald Jurney Traveling Fellowship Grant for the purpose of traveling and painting the great historic and cultural centers of Europe, in the spirit of a modern “Grand Tour”. In 2021, he was awarded and took part in the Hudson River Fellowship, organized by Grand Central Atelier and made possible thanks to Wethersfield Estate. He joined over a dozen other artists in a three weeklong fellowship, fostering a diverse artistic dialogue between traditions from the Hudson River School and contemporary painters in the spirit of fostering the next generation of landscape painters. In the short time since graduating from the Academy, he has also won numerous awards at multiple National Juried Exhibitions and established himself as a promising young artist.
His work draws on his training and appreciation of a variety of traditions such as the American Hudson River School, to French Impressionists or even Spanish Baroque. He is fascinated with how paintings can communicate to us, and is interested in color, mood, and design. As a contemporary painter, he combines these influences and interests as he explores and reacts to the landscape and world around him.
