Paul Bloomer is a contemporary British artist living and working in the Shetland Islands.
Welcome to my website where you will find a body of my artwork spanning almost twenty years and recording a journey from the Blackcountry to Shetland. Looking back through it, I see that my working methods have remained fairly constant even though my subject matter has differed greatly. I work almost entirely by instinct and emotion letting imagery and narrative evolve as I wrestle with the formal elements of composition. I have always believed in the primacy of drawing and the often-desperate search for visual truth in my work.
I was born and raised in the heavily industrialised Black Country and did not consciously choose to become an artist. At some point in my life the urge to create was so great that I had little choice in the matter.
Four years of labouring in an engineering factory on leaving school was a formative influence and went a long way in forming my early social realist vision. I used little colour during these formative years as my world view didn’t seem to be big enough to find colour and beauty amongst the smoking chimney stacks. Charcoal became my medium of choice seeming to be at one with my subject matter, and large scale woodcuts forced my often unclear ideas into shape. Most of my work from this area is very autobiographical with a strong sense of narrative, exploring themes such as oppression, exploitation and captivity.
Fifteen years ago I discovered Shetland, the most northerly part of Britain and immediately became entranced by the ever-changing light over the wild wilderness of the landscape and ocean, so against all logic I loaded my etching press in my car and headed north.
The first Shetland work I produced explored themes such as freedom, growth and rebirth, however I started to become increasingly dissatisfied because I felt that the visual language that I had developed over eighteen years of constant effort was of an urban vernacular and thus not easily transcribed into the Shetland Landscape. So my work began to change from a search for shape and narrative in the landscape to a more painterly colourful language veering towards abstraction.
A large proportion of my Shetland landscape work is painted outside. Working directly from nature shatters all preconceptions and is a constant painterly battle in looking and feeling my way through the myriad of unnameable colours and constantly changing shapes. Sometimes the elements paint the pictures, ice freezes my paint into crystalline forms and wind blows my paint across the page. This sheer force of the elements gives the pictures an energy and dynamism that is impossible to replicate in the relative comfort of the studio. I often paint in the dark guided by the sound and smell of the ocean. I work on many pictures at a time guided by my quest for strong composition. Winter seems to be the time when I am most driven as a painter; sunny flat calms move me least whilst a winter gale has me rushing for my brushes. The intense darkness of a Shetland winter seems to magnify visually and emotionally the short glimpse of light we get. The sun sits low on the horizon casting a powerful sidelight over everything. A few times a year the northern lights dance their way through the midnight sky making one sit in absolute awe in the knowledge of something more powerful than ourselves. I try my hardest to paint this.
A few years ago I discovered the creative potential of painting on an IPod and IPad using the ‘Brushes’ app. This initially started out as not much more than a digital sketch book but I now see it as a very useful and serious artistic media in its own right and I have produced a large body of work on it. The speed of painting on an IPod enables me to do full colour pictures of sometimes fleeting ideas some of which are starting to be translated onto canvas and woodcut.
I hope you enjoy this site.
Paul Bloomer, 2013
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