Patrick McCormick finds joy in painting, giving

For Patrick McCormick, retirement has not meant slowing down.
The Hilton Head Island resident plays golf, tends a 75-by-25-foot garden and paints three days a week. But painting has become a particular passion. He talks about it with an easy laugh and an energy that makes retirement sound anything but retiring.

It began three years ago with a Christmas gift from his wife: a set of oil paints. Now, his work hangs in galleries and homes and his abstracts have attracted attention beyond the Lowcountry.

McCormick seems less interested in building a second career than enjoying the freedom to experiment, create and give back.

“I just want to paint,” he said.

McCormick’s path to art was not a traditional one. His background includes architectural drafting, flying helicopters in the U.S. Army and a successful career in the financial industry.

Business travel took McCormick and his wife overseas, where visits to Europe exposed him to works he had previously seen only in books. Seeing art in person changed his perspective. A later trip to Africa provided another push.

Then his wife gave him the oil paint set.

McCormick started with a landscape, then he painted a leopard. A friend asked whether he could paint her dog. Turns out he could.

Word spread, and soon he was painting other people’s pets. Then came a more difficult request: Could he paint a child?

McCormick agreed to try, and the child’s mother offered to make a charitable donation for the finished portrait.

The painting generated a $1,500 donation to Volunteers in Medicine, McCormick said, and established a pattern. He eventually painted 38 portraits, with proceeds benefiting charitable causes including Volunteers in Medicine and Memory Matters.

But traditional paintings were not enough to keep him interested. McCormick wanted to find something that felt like his own.

“I’m painting, but I’m not happy. Why am I not happy?” said McCormick “It’s making me feel like I’m doing something somebody already is doing.”

He found what he was looking for in abstract art, where the same painting can mean something different to each person who sees it.

“If you do abstract, everybody’s different. Nobody’s the same,” McCormick said. “And you know what? What you might like in abstract, they might not, and vice versa. But that’s the beauty of abstract.”

He also began experimenting with how he made the paintings.

McCormick explored paint pouring, but simply pouring acrylic paint onto a canvas did not hold his interest for long. So, he started changing the process.

Drawing on his technical background, McCormick experimented with additives, including silicone and dish soap, to see how they reacted with paint and heat. He found silicone could produce smaller cells in the paint, while soap created larger bubbles. And those could become water, movement or splashes across a canvas.

The process can involve up to nine layers of paint and a dozen or more cups prepared with different mixtures. Unlike oils, which give him time to reconsider and rework an image, acrylics force decisions quickly.

That suits him. If an abstract is not developing the way he envisioned, he changes direction rather than waiting.

Lately, he has been adding other materials. Sand became part of a painting’s surface. Rocks project from another’s canvas creating texture and depth.

McCormick has little interest in settling on one successful technique and producing variations of it indefinitely.

“How do I go better?” he said. “What do I do next?”

McCormick pays for his own materials and directs the profits from his work to charity. He also donates paintings directly when local charitable organizations approach him, with some auctioned at fundraisers.

He doesn’t know how much his art has raised.

“I have no idea,” he said. “And I don’t want to know.”

Keeping track too closely, he suggested, starts to make painting feel like the business career he left behind.

In less than three years, McCormick has sold more than 100 abstract paintings, with much of the interest coming through word of mouth. His work was featured in South Carolina Voyager in March and in the August issue of Artist Close Up Magazine, an international art publication.

But some of the reactions that mean the most to him have nothing to do with sales or recognition.

McCormick regularly stops for coffee at McDonald’s, where he got to know an employee and learned she did not have art hanging in her home. He showed up at the drive-thru with a painting for her.

“She started crying in the window,” he said.

He returned with more paintings for other employees. On another occasion, he gave a painting to a young girl after she stopped at his table and admired it.
McCormick was visibly touched as he recalled those encounters. Giving away a painting and seeing what it means to someone can be as rewarding to him as creating it.

“You get joy in giving,” he said.

That giving continues Oct 30th. McCormick is donating three paintings to Volunteers in Medicine’s 2026 Circle of Caring Gala, with two slated for the silent auction and one for the live auction.

McCormick has plenty of ideas left to try. If he had the space, he said, he would like to work on canvases as large as 10 feet by 10 feet. For now, his studio remains his garage or, when the weather cooperates, a shady spot beneath a tree.

Ask him what he might try next and the ideas come quickly. There is another technique to test, another material to add, another canvas to make bigger.

For McCormick, that seems to be part of the fun.

“I never come out of the painting room mad,” he said.