Patrick Michael Dennis is a painter, musician, writer, and founder of the art house Wharfechild.

His work lives at the intersections of music, painting, writing, and collaboration where brushstrokes move in rhythm, a canvas is alive with sounds, notes become visions and songs layer in the mind like paint; the forms searching for better questions rather than any easy answers.

Born in Spain and raised between England and Southern California, Dennis looks and sounds half sunburnt Americana, half moody English Romantic, with a through-line of Spanish duende. His art and music are bound by the same forces: myth, survival, imperfection, and spirit.

From childhood, he blurred the line between survival and expression—turning in drawings instead of essays, writing poems in class to turn into songs at band practice. That instinct carried him to art school in Stockport and Salford on the edges of Manchester, just before Oasis and the Britpop storm, winning a place at university to study painting, but then leaving to become a father. But he soon traded canvases for chords, clubs, and the grind of making a living as a musician.

Music swallowed him whole. There were bands, record deals signed and lost, and obscured identities like Byron Nashe before co-founding cult-loved bands Truckee Brothers and Wirepony, earning a reputation for ragged, high-energy shows and myth-soaked lyricism. His solo work, including Atlantic and Fürst in the Dirt, revealed a songwriter unafraid of reinvention: songs cut live to tape, raw, immediate, and charged with life. But painting never stopped. In hotel rooms before gigs he’d throw paint onto canvas, give pieces away, hide them in closets or use them for someone else’s record cover. For years, almost no one knew he painted.

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Painting and music are two voices engaged in the same conversation. They mine the same deep well of our lives, trying to explain the unexplainable; confronting the dreads of life and expressing the joys while skirting the edges of a mystery. Sometimes gently like a cafe patron watching passersby or, as I prefer, like a hunter. An animal in the dark, stalking its prey. Except that this prey might bite back.

Within that stalking a canvas holds rhythm the way a song holds color. Shapes are melodies, brushstrokes are chord movements, and harmonies hide in the background—sometimes you don’t consciously hear them but they are there in the final stroke. And if there is no music in the paint, then there is no connection, yet. If the music has motion and color then I am inspired, without it I must keep hunting. I know that I am not alone in this feeling. Many painters “hear” things and many musicians “see” sound, including many who have gone before me. The music of the spheres.

I am no master. At best I am an antenna attempting to tune in to those voices and attempting to translate them. Then, just maybe, if my dial is right and I listen quietly, they will both work together—the paintings lacing the music with visions, the chords and lyric becoming the foundation of new paintings. An attempt to dial in the visual soundtrack inside my mind, but giving up any control over the outcome. That’s when, if I show up and engage, the mystical might become possible.

I can’t explain these things easily, because it comes from intuition, from emotion—desire, grief, ecstasy, and all the glorious dark myths that we tell ourselves. Most definitely the ones that I tell myself. But if the result awakens a memory, a story, a desire or even deep discomfort, then it’s doing its work. For me AND for you.

At its core, the practice should simply be this: Listen, follow the emotion, and stand still long enough in the midst of the storm to feel life shouting “YES!”. Then, …Act.
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— Patrick Michael Dennis

It took sobriety — and the invitation of a gallery in Nyack, New York — to finally pull that thread out into the open. He painted for a year, obsessively, like his life depended on it. Because it did. Then, that first show, Fürst Art Show, sold out. More than that, it kept him sober. Painting had always been private survival; now it was also public voice.

Myth, memory, and energy drive his canvases, just as they drive his recordings. As a visual artist, Dennis treats canvas like a song. Acrylics, oils, spray paint, and found surfaces collide in works that echo surf and graffiti culture, the motion of waves, and the improvisation of performance. Life and its connections like mycelium threads in the dark are laced throughout, often with unintended consequences as he physically engages with the canvas until he begins to see forms in the layers of paint. The detailed faces and figures rendered in sketch books in his school-days have given way to something with much less definition, no straight lines or pretty accuracies, but instead abstraction and deconstructions, always with a human element. Energy and emotion taking center stage. Just like they do in life.

But the other half of his DNA had always been music and much of Dennis was musically raised under the influence of Welsh/English band, The Alarm. Alongside Frank Lee Drennen of Dead Rock West, he was trained, schooled and thrown into the deep end by guitarist Dave Sharp, who worked them both like boxers — endless rehearsals, melodies repeated until they burned music into muscle, belief drilled deeper than doubt, to then be shoved in front of packed houses to test their mettle; helping transform two music obsessed kids into an intense punk-folk harmony duo, The Homer Gunns. That apprenticeship came roaring back decades later inside Abbey Road, where Dennis stood with Mike Peters and Frank Lee Drennen’s now-bandmate Cindy Wasserman in a small closet, tightening verses Dennis had written for The Scriptures. The room didn’t matter. What mattered was the déjà vu: the way Mike worked was the same language Dave had taught him in a garage sweatbox years earlier. In that moment, Dennis wasn’t chasing prestige; he was back in the garage, but this time with the tools to stand as a peer. And with an immense gratitude for those tools. That moment became the embodiment of the way that his art and music mirror each other—discipline, intuition, and discovery.

Just as his songs carry the echoes of his mentors, his paintings carry the motion of mentors past, learning silk screen as an art-form, that the kids painting trains in the New York boroughs with their short-lived graffiti were true Artists and that the movement and power of Southern California’s crashing waves could be translated into lines and shapes. The colors, oh the colors! From the sunlit coastal desert environment around him, the flower crops of his farmer father and the street influences from around the world on the surf culture of his youth, color was everywhere.

As a writer, he moves between lyric and prose, often circling around mythologies and hidden stories—personal, cultural, and universal. His essays and lyrics reveal a fascination with the interconnectedness of all things: spirit, science, and the shared energy between us. Whether that might only be the physics of the universe or the possibility of a universal soul.

And as a facilitator, Dennis founded Wharfechild, a label and art house built on music, art, collaboration, and conversation. Wharfechild is not a brand but a circle, where artists and audiences stand on level ground, creating together, sharing together and inspiring each other. Its ethos: joy and creativity are antidotes to division, and collaboration is itself the art form.

Across disciplines, Patrick Dennis creates not to impress, but to survive. Whether song, painting, lyric, or collaboration, his work is an invitation — to stumble, to burn, to shine and to connect with the search for the unexplainable.