Patrick Oliver was a British painter. He was born in Leeds, Yorkshire and initially began his artistic education at the Leeds School of Art. It was here that he first discovered abstraction, an approach he would explore throughout his long painterly career. Though an accomplished artist, Oliver did not seek professional success and preferred to paint rather than to exhibit. This attitude was reflected in his long career as an artistic educator, serving as a lecturer for almost 30 years.

Between the years of 1964 to 1993, Oliver taught on the Foundation Diploma course at his alma mater, then known as Jacob Kramer College, where he mentored several eminent British artists including Damien Hirst. His love of abstraction and skill in depicting figurative elements in visceral compositions encouraged his students to explore the relationship between considerations such as space and weight in artistic representation which were so often the hallmarks of Oliver’s own work. Oliver spent much of his career exploring the landscape of his native Yorkshire in his work, frequently composing colourful and at times geometric imaginings of the environment around him. The artist died in 2009, and his work remains in the collection of the Hepworth Wakefield, among others.