Paul Bloomer is a contemporary British artist living and working in the Shetland Islands.
You may also be interested in some of my more recent work featured in New exhibits.
Shetland is an archipelago of islands lying 60 degrees north latitude and closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to London. I made my home here in 1997 attracted by the unique opportunity to live in such close contact with nature in a landscape that can at times feel like paradise found. Although I had painted people my whole life my overwhelming response to Shetland has been towards the landscape. I paint outside internalising and experiencing the landscape on an intense level. In this work I struggle to make painterly sense of the ever-changing wonderland that is Shetland.
I use homemade paint made from raw pigment and gum Arabic in conjunction
with Lascaux gouache on a coloured ground.
Working outside in Shetland can be extremely demanding because of the powerful wind that is never far away. Paper has to be taped on all four edges of the drawing boards which are then weighted with heavy stones to stop them blowing away. I work on several pieces at a time and my paintbrush gets blown out of my hand on a regular basis. See more of my Shetland watercolours
I do not favour sunny flat calms but thrive in a winter gale. The strong wind and ever changing light animate the landscape and artist simultaneously.
My paintings get lashed by sea spray, blasted by sand and frozen in ice. It is important to work with these forces of nature and not fight against them because the effects they have on the pictures is utterly in keeping with the subject matter. There is no room for delicacy in such an environment when it takes great invention just to stop every thing blowing away.
I am not interested in the literal or narrative interpretation of the landscape; rather I try to let the landscape impose its will on the work rather than my will on the landscape. I pursue strong composition and vibrant colour rejecting any easy formularisation. I often paint through the night and the sound and smell of the sea guides my brush in the dark. There can be few more exciting moments for a painter than seeing the colours for the first time as these night pictures arrive in the light of my studio.
Oil
paint is infinitely suitable for painting a landscape in constant flux because
of it is both fluid and robust. I make my own paint by grinding pigment
in cold pressed linseed oil and work on boards primed with acrylic primer.
These boards can take the rigour of painting outside in Shetland. See
more of my Shetland oil paintings
My palette includes flake white, which has the most beautiful buttery consistency enabling dense textural areas to be built up with ease. It doesn’t take long for my paintings to become encrusted with sand as the ever-present horizontal winds builds textures into the wet paint. The slow drying nature of oil paint demands bold decisions in mark making, colour and composition if the artist is to avoid a muddy painting. The most successful of these smaller outside paintings are then brought inside to be developed on a larger scale.
