Denise Foley

Pat Gallagher’s first exposure to fine art was when he was a child. He was in a bathroom in one of the Main Line mansions his mother cleaned when he accidentally knocked a framed painting off the wall. “Thank God I caught it,” he says. “It was an original Picasso, right there in their crapper. Can you imagine that? A lot of people have told me I channel Picasso, but I don’t know about that.”

In the movies, the rest of the story would go something like this: Pat, the son of Irish immigrants who is growing up in what were servants’ quarters in the shadow of Ardmore’s mansions, scrimps and saves to buy his first set of oils and starts painting feverishly. At 18, his portfolio of canvases buys him passage to the Sorbonne and, from there, to New York where he becomes one of the art world’s glitterati.

But this isn’t the movies. And, although Pat is now an artist, until about a year ago, he was an executive recruiter in Louisville, KY, who doodled a lot.

“I was always a doodler,” he says. “My parents told me it was the only time I was quiet, when I was drawing my pictures.” Then, a year ago, while drinking and doodling in a bar on Times Square, he was approached by a man who offered to buy him a drink. “To be honest with you, I thought he was hitting on me so I said, ‘Sure! But let me tell you about my wife and kids first,” Gallagher jokes. But the man, Thomas Kennon, was an art collector and what he was interested in was Gallagher’s drawing. “He told me my style was like Henri Matisse, and I said ‘Who’s that?’ I had one art class in high school and I got a D. But he convinced me that I had a talent worth exploring.”

It hadn’t been the first time he’d been told he had artistic ability. His wife, Trisha, to prove to him that his artwork was good, handed him his first sketch book in 1995 and forced him to promise to stop throwing away everything he drew. Then a gallery owner in Louisville offered to help him put on a show. When he returned to Louisville from New York, he finally took her up on it.

Today, one of his most popular works, an oil pastel drawing called “Bryn Mawr Woman” hangs in the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. Or rather, it did until this week. On Friday, April 6, you can see the haunting figure and a number of Gallagher’s other works at Milk Boy Coffee, 2 E. Lancaster Avenue, in Ardmore, [www.milkboycoffee.com] the second of two shows he’s had in the Philadelphia area in the space of a month.

It’s been an amazing ride for a man who calls himself a “reluctant artist.” Accidental is more like it. “Someone asked me the other day what my style was and I said, ‘I use my fingers.’ I really don’t know what I’m doing,” he confesses. “It was the gallery owner who suggested that I try using oil pastels and I didn’t even know what they were. I got some and my seven-year-old son, Cole, taught me how to use them. The truth is I feel like Forrest Gump. Because all these wonderful things are happening to me and I’m just enjoying it.”

Growing up on the Main Line (“right near the railroad tracks, so technically, it was on the other side of the tracks”) Gallagher couldn’t have imagined that one day he would one day be rubbing shoulders with presidents, governors, lions of industry, and Penthouse girls, as he has this year. “I recently met Governor Rendell and gave him a painting of his wife Midge,” says Gallagher. “And I also met Barack Obama at a fundraiser in Louisville. I did a portrait of his wife, Michelle, which he wasn’t able to accept because of campaign funding laws. But the Obama event really was a big deal. I got a lot of positive feedback there.”

His humble beginnings never presaged anything like this. From the age of 10, Gallagher worked with his father and uncles, all of whom were gardeners. (One uncle is Vince Gallagher, a well-known local Irish musician and radio personality who is president of the Irish Center.) “Pretty much every male figure in my life was a gardener on the Main Line. I used to stand in the back of the truck, going from lawn to lawn, something I would never do with my kids today,” he laughs. “They would throw me in a bed of weeds and I’d be pulling and raking. I grew to hate it, but now I love gardening.” Every other summer, he spent in Ireland, in Creeslough and Ardara in County Donegal, where his parents grew up. “I’m really proud of everything they accomplished here,” he says. “They worked really hard to put me and my brother, John, through school.”

The ebullient Gallagher has put his recruiting business on hold while he explores the reach of his artistic endeavors. He’s been encouraged by his reception by gallery owners and collectors who haven’t blinked at his four-figure prices. But it’s the response of ordinary people that have left a lasting impression. At a show in early March at Liberties Restaurant and Bar [www.libertiesrestaurant.com] in the Northern Liberties section of the city, he recalls a man who was taken with one of his pastels, called “The Ghost Story.” “It’s about running into your past,” Gallagher explains. “The guy, a plumber, asked me what it meant and I asked him what he thought the story was and he nailed it. When I looked at him, he was crying. It hit me later that something I created made a grown man cry. It’s powerful.”

This new turn his life has taken, he says, “is a wave of some kind. I said to my wife, ‘Let’s ride this through this show in my hometown and see what happens.’ I’ll give it my best, honest shot. Whatever happens, I can always say I gave it my best swing at the ball. But I’ll always continue to paint. Since I started, I’ve gone off my blood pressure medicine and I’ve never been happier. It’s surreal that I’m coming home for an art show. I coming home and I keep expecting to get hit by a SEPTA bus,” he laughs. ”People say that’s the Irish in me.”

To see some of Pat Gallagher’s works, view our photo essay, pictures supplied by the artist himself. You can visit even more of his art at his Web site www.patgallagher.org.