About
Pat Ngoho
Pat Ngoho is an American artist and skateboarder whose painting practice has developed through a lifelong engagement with movement, place, and possibility.
His paintings move between abstraction and figuration, using the language of gesture, color, form, and space to explore what can happen when an image is allowed to change direction. The work is less about arriving at a fixed answer than discovering what becomes possible through the process of painting.
Painting is a process of looking, responding, and finding a way through. A mark changes the space around it; one form creates another; something unexpected can become the direction forward. This search gives the work its movement and allows abstraction and figuration to exist together.
Today the studio remains a place of experimentation. Paintings develop through accumulation, interruption, revision, and discovery, with the finished work retaining something of the movement that produced it.
Before the canvas
Finding a Way Through
Skateboarding was one of Ngoho's first laboratories for invention. Growing up in West Los Angeles, he approached the skateboard not simply as a way to ride, but as a way to explore what could be done with a place, a body, and a board. In the late 1970s he created and developed the Manual Roll, introducing a new movement into skateboarding's evolving vocabulary. That spirit of experimentation—finding a line, inventing a way through, and turning the existing environment into a place of possibility—continues in his painting.