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“There, on small, spray-painted canvases were stencils of loving defiance.”
I’ve been returning to Galway since May of last year.
Any chance I get, I wander the medieval quarter, always seeking sacred spaces.
On a recent walking tour at night of folklore and hauntings, right after our guide told us about the legend of the black dog with lobster claws that rises out of the River Corrib, chasing those who crossed over a bridge at midnight, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I asked my husband if he saw anything. Stunned, he told me not to move and proceeded to remove a very large and very real spider from the plastic flower I had pinned to my hat. A perfect mood setter for our next stop - a Gothic stone wall adjacent to St. Nicholas’ Church, which commemorates the hanging of Walter Lynch in 1493 by his own father, the Mayor.
I love ghost stories, and Ireland is a place where the spirits come to life. On a recent visit to Eyre Square, I was wandering through the streets after a visit to Charlie Byrne Bookshop to find Diary of a Man in Despair in the original German, when I saw a street artist whose work spoke to my soul. There, on small, spray-painted canvases were stencils of loving defiance.
There in pastel colors was a kid spray-painting graffiti with the words: “You Won’t Teach Me To Hate”
And a laughing Buddha with the phrase: “Make Forgiveness Great Again”
A wistful child a paint can and the words: “I wish I was your phone because you never put it down”
And Tupac Shakur reimagined as Shakespeare, and Charles Bukowski in neon adorned by his own words, Kurt Cobain as Van Gogh, and Jesus being pelted by cell phones.
“Let him who is without sin cast the first phone…”
The artist didn’t see me marveling at his brilliance, because he was head down on tarp, creating a series of a member of the band Kneecap in an Irish flag baclava.
When he was finished, I asked him how much he sells each piece for and he told me whatever I can afford. He then explained, “Poor people need art. Rich people need art.” As I would soon learn, this artist gives his work away for free.
“This city’s given me so much, I can never repay it,” he said.
He explained he had been diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, thought he was not going to live to see his kids grow up, and wanted to leave these messages behind for them.
“These words are what I wanted them to know.”
He said he’s healed and now paying karmic debts through this work.
I asked him if he would be willing to give me an interview, and what follows are excerpts from our recorded conversations. Lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
‘You Won’t Teach Me To Hate’
And other defiant messages of love from Galway street artist Patrick Loewen. Part of a series of culture reports from Co Galway Ireland
“All the troubles…”
Heidi Cuda: Can you tell us your name and where people can find you.
Patrick Loewen: My name is Patrick Loewen, and you can find me on Instagram at People Loves Diamond.
Heidi: And what brought you to this point where you are basically offering your art up for donation in Galway? Free to those who can’t afford to make a donation. It’s remarkable really.
Patrick: How did I get to that financial point or how did I get to Galway?
Heidi: Wherever you want to start the story.
Patrick: I got really lucky coming to Galway as a boy, when I was in a lot of trouble - criminally, psychologically, physically, sexually. I mean, like, all the troubles. I’m from Vancouver Island originally, and my mom brought me to a Galway boarding school, gave them a fake check, and left me there.
Early memories include Spring Break and Easter, where I’d stay with an African refugee family. I still go to church with an 80-year-old African woman on Sundays, who introduces me to everyone as her son.
Heidi: That’s beautiful.
Patrick: Right?! So I stayed in Galway, and by the time I got home for a visit to Vancouver, I had finished school. I was working already as a chef, but my childhood friends were gun toting, Escalade driving, drug dealers, the kind who were controlling our neighborhood. And the first night back, one of them had stabbed a bouncer in the neck with two steak knives.
And I had to hide… I was terrified. And there was a girl there who I knew from when we were kids. And she said, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be at this party.” And she accused me of being a drug dealer. And I said, “I’m not a drug dealer. I’ve never been locked up.” I was just 16.
I explained that I’d been living in Ireland for years, and she ended up letting me stay at her house. I was so scared. I didn’t want any part of that old life. I’d come from this stability that I found in Galway, and on my first night, I’m already back living with crack dealers. And so, I stayed at her house, and we got to know each other, and she just had a newborn baby. I was raised by a single mother without a father, and understood.
I moved back to Ireland, and we wrote to each other for a couple years, and then, eventually, I moved back and married her by the time I was 21. And we had kids. By the time I was about 30, I said, “We have to leave here.” Where I lived in Vancouver, it was covered in tents and fentanyl and death, predators, and traps. And I told her, “Just let’s return to Galway. It’s so safe.” To give you an idea of the difference: I’ve sold art on the street for five years, and no one asked me once if I wanted to buy any drugs. I knew that’s where I want my kids to be raised. I don’t feel the predators here that I did as a child, getting forced to sell drugs, getting forced to refine cocaine, and process marijuana. I was working at grow ops as a little kid and never paid.
“This place is a life-saving miracle”
I feel like Galway saved my family, saved my life. And I’ve taken too much. It saved me in my childhood. It saved my wife. All her friends from back home became prostitutes. They’re all dead.
So for what Galway’s given me, for what it’s given my wife, for what it’s given my children. Who am I to ask for a penny from any of these people? This place is a life-saving miracle. I’m trying to pay a debt to a city that saved my life. Trying to pay back what I owe to this city.
Heidi: Wow. I feel that. Co Galway has a healing power that is undeniable. Can you explain your journey with cancer?
Patrick: The pandemic had just started, and I was home with my kids. And I couldn’t sing my bedtime songs. So I thought, I’ve always sung my kids bedtime songs. Every night, I’d come home when they were asleep. I’d still sing them songs. And I was missing these notes, and it was getting worse and worse. You can’t call a doctor during a pandemic and be like, “I’m having trouble singing bedtime songs.” They don’t care. But eventually, I can’t speak. I’d lost my voice entirely. And the doctor told me to come in for testing.
“So, it looks like you’ve got cancer on your vocal cords,” the doctor said. I had a scan, and it’s actually far more sinister. The doctor said the words, “It’s in your lymph nodes.” So now I’m thinking, I need to get my affairs in order.
“And now I just think, ‘I’m dying.’”
I was scheduled for a meeting on the following Monday. But that weekend, the national health care in Ireland got cyber-attacked, so I didn’t get a doctor’s visit for three months. And now I just think, “I’m dying.”
And at that point, I mean, before cancer, I wasn’t a good person. I was a chef, I’d won awards, but I was also someone who could get my hands on whatever you wanted. I’d concoct drugs out of legal ingredients - lidocaine and caffeine - and unfortunately, I was addicted to my own supply. And then all of a sudden, fucking cancer. I’m addicted to my own drugs. I’m losing my voice. I’m losing my wife. Radiation is killing my smell and taste. I lost my profession. My identity was built on being a master chef.
And one day, your left was fucking nothing - you’re just a bare, naked human in a forest on a fucking broken tree branch with a rope around your neck, just trying to end it.
And I’m like, “I can’t even kill myself right.”
And so, I lived.
And now, I’m gonna build myself back, right? And, the only thing left that I had confidence doing was painting.
Heidi: Wow. The reason I’m here talking to you today is the fact that your art speaks to my soul. You speak the message or the language of my soul. Love, beauty, forgiveness, defiance, punk, rap, poetry, all of it.
“God needs an atheist for this job”
Patrick: Through all of this, I became a man of faith. I had an encounter where, again, I’m trying to kill myself. This time, in my bathtub with liquid morphine and ketamine. This is right at the end of my cancer treatment. The radiation’s finished, and it’s painful, all my mouth is burned. There are days when I can’t drink water. Body weight’s just shriveling down. And, I get this profound spiritual experience.
An angel came into my bathtub and told me that God had work for me to do, and I was laughing. “I’m an atheist,” I say. “You must be in the wrong bathtub.”
And the angel was laughing too, and said, “God needs an atheist for this job.” The angel told me that the Garda was gonna raid my house in three days. And I said, “That’s it?” He said, “Yeah, that’s it. And, you gotta paint.” I was like, “I don’t fucking paint.”
He said, “You’re gonna beat your cancer. You’re gonna watch your kids grow old, and you’re gonna be one of the most famous artists in the world.”
So what did I have to lose? I cleaned my house, threw out anything and everything drug-related. And there was a lot.
I had to come clean with my kids, and tell them I wasn’t a good man. But I was going to change.
The Garda comes in, there are no drugs in the house. I told my kids nothing bad is gonna happen to them. It was three days later that the Garda kicked through my door, the battery ram, the whole thing. They had wiretaps, I’d been under surveillance, they had my wife under surveillance. And I was clean. And I was going to live.
And now I have faith. It’s not a religious thing. It’s faith. I think that angel may have been the universe speaking through me.
All I know is what I’ve seen.
I had one more experience – this time, it was a golden being – also in my bathtub. I don’t know what or who it was. I didn’t talk, and it put its hand on my head, and I felt this golden energy shoot down my neck, and my chest, my spine, my brain was just tingling. I could feel this golden light. And the next day, I had 6,000 ideas in my head, and I can’t stop writing them down.
“The edge of heaven…”
If you looked at my social media before that experience, it was just chef dishes.
I never had a prophetic philosophical thought in my life. I got sober, and I can connect with that voice inside me. Before those events, I was like under the water, drowning, and after that, a veil lifted, and I was at the edge of heaven.
Heidi: If you could summarize the art you create for a blind person, if you could say what’s being channeled through you, what would it be?
Patrick: Before we crossed the continents, before humans touched, we were separate, all corners of the earth, and we never knew each other, we never knew of each other. We followed the same rules. Do not poison the well. Protect the children, don’t steal from the tribe. Respect the dead… Well, this is the voice of God. Whether that’s just innate coding inside us that makes society form the way it does, or if it’s some omnipotent being, I don’t know that.
But it’s a voice that’s in all of us. It’s the things we were all saying before we confused each other. Before we saw flags, before we saw borders and walls, before we saw agriculture, before we saw a sword, or a shield, we knew these rules, they were in us.
Heidi: Anything else that you want to say to the world right now, because in a way, you’ve come out from this sort of hellscape, and now you are living some sort of dream.
Patrick: Yeah. I feel like we only get three jobs in this life: you’re born, you love, and you die. I’ve already been born. I fucking damn well know I’m gonna die. There’s only one job left. And that’s what I try to do. I just try to create beautiful things, give them to people, tell them I love them. You know? That’s it.
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Author’s note: After our interview, I walked with Patrick to his studio, where I get to witness the chef’s approach to street art, how much prep goes into his work, and I told him that I’d just started painting and how scared I was of failing. He told me to go ahead and set out to fail, and encouraged me to create something intentionally ugly, to just see what happens. And like magic, my next piece was beautiful.—hsc
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What an absolutely glorious, beautiful, life-affirming, hope-giving post. Tears in my eyes as I read of this man’s journey, what the city of Galway gave to him, and what he is sharing with the world. Just beautiful. Thank you Heidi. ❤️🌞✌️