He studied at the Melbourne Art School under E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St. George Tucker,[2] at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne and continued his studies in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian under Lucien Simon, André Lhote and Maxime Maufra.

He arrived in Hawaii in 1916 on a stopover from Sydney to New York, and decided to stay with a Parisian friend living in Honolulu.

[4] At the 1918 Spring Annual of the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA) his wood block prints were said to be "especially fine in color.

"[6] That summer his art was given a one-man exhibition at the SFAA galleries and he contributed three colour prints (The Steeple Chase, The Bull Fight, and The Long Beach) to the Seventh Annual of the California Society of Etchers.

Patterson married painter and former student Viola Hansen in 1922, and the two became major figures of the arts in the Pacific Northwest region.