29/01/2026
"Every culture from every age has been dealing with this same sort of poignance and fragility of human existence," he says. "You realise that your life is not just mundane. Your life is filled with mysteries - the biggest being the mystery of this existence, in this crazy universe, on this planet teeming with life," he says.
By spending so much time with art from all over the world, Patrick has gained a new perspective on life - and slowly come to terms with the grief of losing his brother.
After his older brother died, Patrick Bringley slowed his life right down, spending hours in stillness as an art gallery guard...
"I didn't want to just rush back to some office job where I was, you know, clickety-clack, back on the pace of everyday living," Patrick says of the time after his brother's death.
He'd been working on the prestigious New Yorker magazine. But what he really wanted was an "honest, straightforward job."
The job he found, at the age of 25, was to be a guard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
During that time, he came to understand the value of stillness.
Patrick's brother died from a soft tissue sarcoma, a type of cancer. And while his brother was ill, Patrick became used to a kind of stillness.
"The stillness in hospital rooms is rather profound," he says. "I mean, there was quite a lot of just sitting by the bedside of someone who is suffering and who is dying. And in my brother's case, someone who was doing so with incredible bravery and grace."
A few weeks after his brother died at the age of 28, Patrick and his mother went on a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There, they found a similar kind of stillness amongst the paintings of love and suffering.
Patrick remembers his mother stopping in front of a painting of The Pietà - Christ's mother Mary holding her dead son in her arms - and breaking down.
A few weeks later, Patrick applied to work at New York's Met. The job involved so many hours of standing that it came with an allowance for socks - and a new pair of shoes every year.
Patrick spent ten years quietly communing with the art, or helping visitors if they needed it. In that time, he counted 8,496 painted human figures.
"You don't have any emails to write, you don't have things to do... [you just need to] be a human being, your full self... present in this moment," he says.
Patrick also found family and companionship amongst the other museum guards. Most were much older than him, and came from all over the world and all walks of life.
"I was treated as a peer," he says. "And I learned from them and I made friends with them. And I sort of, you know, gained my footing as a full-blown adult."
But what helped him above all, was the art.
"Every culture from every age has been dealing with this same sort of poignance and fragility of human existence," he says.
By spending so much time with art from all over the world, Patrick has gained a new perspective on life - and slowly come to terms with the grief of losing his brother.
"You realise that your life is not just mundane. Your life is filled with mysteries - the biggest being the mystery of this existence, in this crazy universe, on this planet teeming with life," he says.
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