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It’s a small painting of two pears and an apple, just 9-by-13 inches. Patrick Farrell has recently finished it for an exhibition at Grace Chosy Gallery in Madison. In the painting, the pears and apple are poised on a ledge against a dark background. Though it looks like a simple composition, when you think about it, there are infinite ways these three pieces of fruit might be arranged. Farrell has leaned the pear into the apple and aligned their stems on a diagonal. The second pear rests on its side, not touching the other fruit. A tattered leaf follows the diagonal of the stems into the dark background. Juicy red currants are scattered on the ledge, drawing the eye around the painting. It’s pure poetry, really.

This calculated orchestration of light, color and composition presents to the viewer a seamless, effortless, timeless arrangement, one we do not question because it is so right in every way. With Farrell’s paintings, we slide visually into them fully assured that they exist to give comfort, pleasure and warm reassurance that the simple beauty of life can be accessed in the proper contemplation of a pear. We want and need to know that meaning and value reside in simple gestures: light hitting a lemon, the graceful arc of a leaf.

Patrick Farrell is a master of still-life painting, and because of it, he may be the state’s most successful painter. Most professional artists teach or have some part-time job, but Farrell is among the few who has made a full-time living solely from his artwork for his entire career. Painting is time-consuming and expensive and requires intense dedication. In an age that values novelty and quick grati-fication, the slow measure of a painter’s trade finds little currency. We have become so accustomed to facsimile that the authentic vision and personal touch of a work of art can seem disquietingly intimate and quite unnecessary.

Farrell’s paintings are an exception. He sells just about everything he paints and often struggles to keep up with the demand. With prices ranging from $1,600 for a 4-by-4-inch butterfly to $14,000 for an elaborate composition of fruit in a silver bowl, he appeals even to people who might not normally buy art.

This success is all about illusion. Farrell seems to insist in both his carefully wrought paintings and his painstakingly choreographed career that the vicissitudes of life can be brought into control and harmony for at least long enough to brush against the feeling of infinite perfection. Although Farrell’s life has been quite messy, he appears to float benignly above it all, buoyed by the ripe poetry of his compositions. Or at least he makes us think that. He is, after all, a master of illusion.

To some art world professionals, Farrell’s paintings are old-fashioned and out-of-date, purely pretty works lacking any edge. Yet his distinctive combination of artistry and personality seems to resonate deeply with a surprisingly diverse group of fans.

“Why do these paintings have a hold on Wisconsin buyers?” asks the painter Thea Kovac. “The luster of china, lush fruit, the allure of rich fabric, the glint of finely wrought metal all carefully placed and blessed by soft halos of light is a turn-on for anyone who leads a less-than-perfect life.”

Patrick Farrell answers the door of his historic East Side home on Summit Avenue in a mannered flutter of smiles and impish charm. He is short, maybe 5-foot-8, with a soft tuft of reddish-brown hair that wafts upward like electrified milkweed. His thin mustache and goatee appear almost in defiance of his boyishness. Farrell won’t reveal his age but concedes he’s “pushing 60.” He could be 48 or 58. His voice escalates as he giggles. A charmer who creates a quick sense of intimacy, Farrell offers modesty and embarrassment at compli-ments regarding his work.

Farrell has shared his home with longtime friend Jim Schroeder, a retired glue chemist, for at least 30 years. The home offers a seamless extension of the artist’s paintings: antiques, flowers, Blue Willow porcelain, art books and a controlled illumination that seems to drape the house in late-afternoon twilight no matter the time of day. An eerie, ageless quality imbues Farrell, his home and his paintings. It is 1 p.m., but a candle flickers on a sconce, the silver bowl glistening with reflections. A tray of cheese, crackers and grapes and a bottle of wine emerge magically from the kitchen. Still life, nature, death – things held perfectly in a polished stasis of existence and non-existence. This is Patrick Farrell, and lots of people want what he has to offer.

We are at his opening at Grace Chosy Gallery. Oscar Mayer and his wife, Geraldine, cannot decide which of the three rose paintings (red, orange or pink) to purchase. Farrell chats amiably with one person after another, giving each his full attention. When a fellow artist talks to him and her husband stands idly by, Farrell makes sure to include him in the conversation. “And what do you do?” he asks. The husband works for a health insurance company, and Farrell manages to turn it all into a long and interesting interaction.

One after another, people come up to him with their stories: “I first saw your work 12 years ago when I was in graduate school,” says Dianna. “I totally fell in love with a painting of green apples and had to buy it, even though I had no money. It took me at least a year to pay it off.” Farrell smiles and says he wants to meet Dianna’s daughter, who has just wandered back to the cracker table.

Consciously, but without strain, he gives each person a moment of intimacy. Meanwhile, Mrs. Oscar Mayer has selected the pink rose for $4,200. She is certain now, and Oscar, who is in his 90s, seems equally pleased. Mrs. Mayer explains that she owns a number of Farrell’s paintings. She had wanted a rose out of his last show at Milwaukee’s Tory Folliard Gallery, but they were all sold. She easily recounts every Patrick Farrell painting in her collection and when and where she bought them.

Perishability is the tantamount human condition. It underlies every waking moment. We must take heed or life will slip from us before we know what happened. That is the historic function of the still-life painting – to serve as a memento mori or “reminder of death.” When the vases of flowers or pieces of fruit moved off the triptych panels of Netherlandish religious painting into their own realm in the 1500s, each arrangement still carried an underlying spiritual message: Life is short, repent now. Each perfect pear or glistening grape was a reminder of God’s perfection (or a symbol of the Eucharist). And each slightly drooping leaf or blemished apple kept viewers from los-ing themselves in that beauty. All fades. Celebrate life, but don’t forget the longer-lasting eternal truth of the soul.

If anyone knows about perishability, it is Farrell. First a fire gutted much of his home in 1978. Its unknown cause still rankles Farrell as he speaks of the loss of his record collection, childhood photographs and signed Marilyn Monroe picture, as well as the ensuing two-year, quarter-million-dollar rebuilding of much of the home’s interior. He was 30 then and had already been successfully plying his trade as a painter for more than 10 years. Just before the fire, in 1977, after getting rained out of the Lakefront Festival of Arts, he had decided to quit doing art fairs. The stress of packing up and traveling to Florida or Michigan on the seasonal circuit of higher-quality art festivals had been fun and lucrative but exhausting.

During these years, Farrell had invented a form of self-promotion that was generating enough business to enable him to forego art fair revenues. Hosting a yearly private exhibition at his home, Farrell would invite 300 “friends” to an annual Sunday afternoon salon. Catered appetizers, fresh flowers, a bar and Patrick Farrell hugging and kissing all who came his way created an atmosphere of warm and gracious socializing. “The paintings would all be sold in the first 15 minutes,” says Farrell. “I had a large following. Eventually, the parties got too big. I’d invite 300 and they’d all show up.”

So Farrell added a winter evening party each December and had a permanent bar built in the upstairs of his house. One can imagine the pile of fur coats in the bedroom as guests merrily munched canapés and showed friends the paintings they had just purchased. But even with two shows a year, the parties outgrew his space and he eventually rented an elegant banquet hall at the Pfister Hotel for his salons. He and Jim had to construct special portable walls for the endeavor. But it all paid off, sustaining him with a full-time income through the mid-1990s.

Farrell’s promotional efforts didn’t end there. From the start of his career, he reasoned that people wouldn’t keep coming to buy his works throughout the year if there wasn’t something to hold their interest. Farrell would enter or be invited to lots of art shows and competitions, and any time his paintings were shown, he would methodically send out press releases. His name regularly appeared in The Milwaukee Journal: “Patrick Farrell shows work in Washington, D.C.,” “Patrick Farrell wins Certificate of Merit,” “Farrell in World Trade Center Show, New York City.” Most artists don’t seem to possess both the skill and stamina to make art and the business acumen to manage their own careers. It’s precisely because Farrell was equally adept at both that he has become so successful.

Just when Farrell seemed to be cresting, having recovered from the fire and selling all he could paint, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack. It was a shock. He was in his mid-30s and had no clue his health was uncertain. Bone thin after 10 days of a severe intestinal flu, Farrell had spent the day lunching with some art professionals, including visiting a German dealer who later that afternoon would buy one of his figurative paintings. Even 25 years later, Farrell recalls with precision the cold October Friday and the tarragon dressing on his lunch salad. “I have never been able to stand the taste of tarragon since that day.”

Farrell remembers his right ear bothering him – “like a pressure sound” – and calling a doctor friend. “He checked my ear out and sent me home. I was in rush hour traffic on the Marquette Interchange and felt severe indigestion.” He drove home and within a few hours was taken by ambulance to St. Mary’s, where a new balloon pump kept him alive. Farrell was hospitalized for nearly two months and had bypass surgery that December. The cardiologist blamed the heart attack on his pack-a-day smoking habit. Farrell blamed it on his tough childhood and poor diet.

“My recovery was slow,” says Farrell. “They took a vein out of my leg, and that took years to heal. It was hard to maneuver normally. Now I can’t smoke and shouldn’t drink coffee. It scared the hell out of me.”

Complicating the crisis was that Farrell had little health insurance. To his surprise, the art community organized an auction/fundraiser to help pay his medical expenses. “All these people I didn’t even know, like John Colt, Nancy Elkhorn and Robert Burkert and so many others, did this,” Farrell recalls. “The Pfister donated the ballroom, food and wine for the event. They made $18,000.”

After the surgery, Farrell’s health stabilized for a decade. The 1980s was a productive period. Farrell’s work in the ’70s was inconsis-tent, as he also experimented with figurative work, trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) collages and kitschy movie star portraits. But by the ’80s, he had found his voice, achieving a refinement in both content and technique. Compositions became more elaborate, with fruit spilling out of silver bowls. Farrell worked deep into -reflections, allowing layers of space to open illusionistically. His backgrounds lightened up from dark layers of umber to delicate blues and grays.

But his medical problems returned in the 1990s with surging heart rhythms and more surgeries: defibrillator implant (1994); angioplasty (1995); abdominal aortic aneurysm (1998); ventral hernia surgery (1999); second defibrillator implant (2002); more surgeries in 2003, 2004 and 2005; a second, smaller heart attack in September 2005; and his fourth defibrillator implant, leading up to his most recent defibrillator repositioning surgery in February 2006.

“I see doctors all year long,” he says, joking that he’s been at St. Luke’s Medical Center so often there’s a wing named after him. “I love the food at St. Luke’s, especially their angel food cake and a certain pudding. Every day I wake up, and this sounds so corny, but I’m so thankful to be alive.”

Farrell’s father had retired early from his welding job at Ladish Company due to high blood pressure and health problems. But Farrell says his father chewed tobacco, smoked Camels to the filters and ate pickled pigs’ feet, attributing his ill health to lifestyle more than heredity. Still, he has no illusions of invulnerability.

“I’m here on overtime,” he says. “I’m sure I’ve used up seven of my nine lives.”

Do Farrell’s troubles somehow surface in his paintings? The crisp, tight verism of his style speaks of an artificiality, despite the magic realism. His paintings are too perfectly composed, too lush, too gracefully

In both life and art, Farrell seems obsessed with detail. His paintings are minutely observed. Particularities and subtleties abound – from the complex curl of a leaf to the speckled surface of a butterfly’s wing. When asked any question about his life, Farrell embarks on a verbal journey that may consume the next hour or three. His mind works novelistically, unreeling story after story, with layers of incidental detail. Recalling his heart attack, he remembers the suit he was wearing, the moment he loosened his belt to relieve indigestion, traffic conditions on the freeway, the particular cloudy light of that day, the conversation at lunch, the salad dressing, how the medics stood around his bed and discussed his condition, how Jim had come home unexpectedly early from work and on and on. His verbal style is not exactly digressive, just way more delineative than the average person’s. And so is his art – detailed, descriptive, precise.

Farrell’s upbringing suggests a dickens novel. A shrimpy, scrappy kid is born in the lumberjack backwaters of the Upper Peninsula. The town is called Hardwood, perfectly evoking its Finnish/Irish practicality. When he was very young, the family moved to Cudahy, where his father took a job as a welder. The youngest of four kids, Farrell says he and his older brother, mom and dad at first all lived in the small trailer his dad had pulled behind the car on the move from Michigan. It had no bedroom or bathroom. When he was in fourth grade, Farrell’s mother, who became schizophrenic, suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized at Milwaukee County Psychiatric Hospital on and off for seven years. His father, although very caring, worked second shift at Ladish and wasn’t around much.

Farrell all but raised himself. His father had a credit account at a corner grocery, and Farrell would go there to negotiate his meals, often talking the proprietor into candy and junk food (which he attributes to his health issues). He started smoking at age 12 and by eighth grade decided to “give the school the impression that we were moving” and that he would not be returning the next year. His father didn’t find out he had stopped going to school until much later, when an acquaintance reported seeing Farrell working as a busboy in Downtown Milwaukee.

Although Farrell managed to survive these hardships, he endured a lot, including being sexually assaulted by a neighbor in the trailer park whom he had asked to fix his sled when he was 10 years old. The man was a friend of his father’s, so he never told anyone about the incident.

“I had to grow up very quickly,” Farrell says. “I couldn’t relate to kids my own age because I just wasn’t leading a normal life.”

Yet he says there are few things he’d want to change in his life story: “The big regret I have is not having my mother for all those years.”

By 15, he was mostly living on his own, doing odd jobs for rental properties in the Sherman Park area. “It was too far to go back home, so I just stayed at a friend’s parents’ house.” By 16, he’d landed a job with a wholesale record distributor and in his spare time did pencil sketches of the recording artists. “I loved music and theater and had really wanted to become an actor, so the job was great.”

Someone he worked with gave his sketch of Eydie Gorme to her when she was singing in Chicago, and Gorme invited Farrell to the concert. He met her backstage. “She pinched my cheek and said someday I hope to have a little boy just like you,” Farrell recalls. “She told me she loved the drawing.”

When he was 17, he got an apartment with a friend, and there Farrell made his first paintings. “The walls were bare and I decided I would make some paintings. I went out and bought canvas and paints. I painted a few still lifes and landscapes – a copper bowl of flowers – maybe 12 or 13 paintings, and hung them on the wall. I had always enjoyed art and was good in art class in grade school, so I figured I could do this.”

That summer, he was driving past a small art fair on 27th and National and decided to stop. “I walked around and thought that a lot of the work wasn’t that good, that my work was just about as good,” he says. When he saw a newspaper item about an -upcoming art fair at Capitol Court, he had Jim build some easels to display the work from his living room walls. People responded well, he says. He sold a linoleum print for $2. And so, with no formal art training and little exposure to the art world, Farrell launched a career at age 17.

People marvel at the fact that Patrick Farrell is entirely self-taught. Ironically, his self-taught status fits perfectly with the historic tradition of American still-life painting. Most of those painters in the late 1700s and 1800s served a middle-class clientele and didn’t have the luxury of European art schooling. There were no art academies in America yet, so they learned their craft the same way Farrell did – by studying books and reproductions of the Dutch masters’ work and possibly (after some success) taking a trip to Europe.

Marilyn Auer, widow of the late James Auer, longtime art critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, says Farrell was one of the first artists the future critic met, back when Auer was feature editor for the Appleton Post-Crescent. “Jim photographed Patrick at a summer art fair run by the Appleton Gallery of Art when Patrick was still a teenager,” says Marilyn. “Jim was rather taken with his work. He realized how young Patrick was and already working on a career.”

The artist and critic developed a lifelong friendship. Marilyn recalls attending one of Farrell’s salons in 1973 or ’74, shortly after she and James moved to Milwaukee. “We came in the door, and most of the people there were artists, so Jim was swept away and I was left stranded. I went into the room of paintings, found a chair and sat down. Shortly after, Patrick swept into the room, knelt down beside me and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve left you to wander alone.’ He took my elbow and introduced me to everyone. I will never forget that. That’s Patrick.”

James Auer died in December 2004. Last December, perhaps to commemorate his death, Marilyn bought a painting from Farrell’s solo show at Tory Folliard Gallery. “What did I like about that particular painting?” Marilyn asks in response to my question. “At first it was just a gut reaction, but then I began to realize why. It was a simple apple with a red blush on its shoulder, three leaves, one wilted, sitting on a light surface, and then it gets dark as it goes back. It’s relatively simple but has a wide gilt frame that is rich but almost rustic. The frame serves the painting incredibly well; the combination of the simplicity and richness is crucial to Patrick’s work.”

As though in compensation for its hardships, Farrell has fashioned a life with -remarkable stability. He’s lived in the same place with the same person for almost all of his life. He’s made the same style of paintings for decades. He works on the wooden easel he bought as a teenager. He uses only Copal medium and neatly organized number #7 or #8 flat sable brushes and #3 rounds. He gets up at 9 a.m. and might work until 1 p.m. He rests each night after dinner and then goes back to work at 10 or 11 p.m. for a few hours. He’s never had a studio outside of his home and works in a small bedroom on the second floor. Every arrangement of fruit he paints seems to emphasize this longing for order and consistency.

The funny thing about Farrell is he doesn’t know his work is not cool, that art rooted in tradition and convention and surface finish went out of style in 1900. “What do you mean,” he snaps, clearly offended. “Students in the academic world fancy me.” (He draws out the word “fancy” for emphasis.) “Young people come to my shows and even buy paintings. I don’t feel out of the loop whatsoever. I see work like mine in the art magazines all the time. Realism is back in vogue. There’ll always be a place for it.”

One art world professional offered this take on Farrell’s work: “My goodness, this is the 21st century.… Mr. Farrell’s works don’t advance still-life painting even a minute beyond the memento mori of the Dutch masters. They’re altogether lacking in anything approaching psychological resonance. Undeniably, there is high craft in his painting, but the same might be said about many of those Owen Gromme-type wildlife artists who turn out canvases where one can count every hair on the timber wolf’s back. Mr. Farrell’s paintings mostly strike me as eye candy.”

Still, a diverse audience – librarians to lawyers to fellow artists – often falls inexplicably in love with his work and feels driven to own one. Farrell attributes part of his success to the fact that men like his work. The beauty, craft and realism offer a reassurance of quality. His work does not leave the viewer wondering if it’s really good or why it’s hanging in a gallery.

Joana Smocke, who lives in a Terrace Avenue mansion, was moved to tears when her husband, Chris (whose Smocke and Associates served as project manager for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Calatrava -addition) gave her a birthday surprise this year – a major Patrick Farrell painting of fruit in a silver bowl. Joana had known Farrell since 1975 when she worked for the museum and first saw his work in the collector’s gallery there. She couldn’t afford it then. Her new $12,000 still life (one of the most -expensive paintings Farrell has ever sold) hangs in her bright breakfast nook between two ornate lamps. “I think he has such an eye for composition, texture, and he’s amazing with light,” says Joana. “I think he’s every bit as masterful as the Dutch still-life artists.”

On the opposite end of the social strata is Mary Jean Hanson, who lives in a Wauwatosa ranch and bought her first Patrick Farrell painting at Tory Folliard’s show in December 2005. She had first seen his work in 1985 at RiverEdge Gallery in Mishicot, a gallery Farrell helped create with friend Christopher Baugniet. “I’ll never forget it,” says Hanson. “I walked up the steps and here was a picture of an apple. I was just stunned. I couldn’t believe it. I fell in love with his work, but we’re not exactly wealthy people, and we couldn’t afford to buy it.”

Five years later, the picture still haunted Hanson. She called local galleries and found that Farrell lived in Milwaukee. She phoned him and “we had such a chat,” she recalls. From then on, Hanson was on Farrell’s personal mailing list (which now numbers 1,200). She and her husband went to his exhibitions. A year ago, her husband died and Hanson decided it was finally time to buy a Farrell painting, after 20 years of longing. She selected a small painting of a butterfly.

“For me, it’s a symbol of the new beginning I have to start in my life with my husband gone,” says Hanson. “I have so much respect for that man. He is self-taught. I’m a very religious person, and I fully believe that it’s a talent from God.”

At 9 p.m., the reception at Grace -Chosy ends. Farrell has been graciously chatting for three hours while Jim has been -drifting almost invisibly around the gallery, taking pictures. Jim seems to fully embrace his role as Farrell’s cohort. He does the taxes, gessoes the boards, assembles the frames, packs the car and photographs all of Farrell’s work.

I happen to end up at the same -restaurant as Farrell and Jim after the opening. I wander over to say good-bye, and Farrell, with his usual charm, jokes and chats. But he’s taken off his glasses and his eyes are tired. What looks effortless to any observer – his gra-ciousness and warmth – has taken its toll. Patrick Farrell is tired. The illusion of perfect, composed beauty that he is so -adept at creat-ing does indeed droop and wilt. I ask him if he is going to let the Turkish restaurant’s owner read his coffee grounds, a free house spe-cialty, if you know to ask. He says no. I wonder why he’d turn down such a fun offer. Then I realize that Patrick Farrell long ago de-cided to manage his own destiny and has done so rather beautifully.

Milwaukee-based freelance writer -Debra Brehmer’s last feature was “Magnificent Obsession,” about art collectors.