ABOUT - Paul Bloomer

ABOUT THE ARTIST

BIOGRAPHY

Paul Bloomer was born and bought up in the industrial Black Country of England. He studied painting at post graduate level at the Royal Academy Schools in London and in 1997 he moved to Shetland where he lived for 26 years.

He has regularly exhibited nationwide, and his work is held in many public collections such as Shetland Museum, Dudley art Gallery, New Art Gallery Walsall, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Barnett Council, Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, Kings Hospital London, Free Fields Collection and the Ruth Bochard Collection, as well as private collections worldwide.

Paul lectured at Shetland Campus of the University of the Highlands and islands between 1998 -2024 where he led the foundation course and the BA(Hons) fine art.

Paul’s art simultaneously weeps for the world and celebrates the world by exploring the tensions, fault lines and connections between nature culture and spiritualty in a dance between light and dark.

STATEMENT

My art explores the tensions, fault lines and connections between nature, culture and spirituality.

Walking is central to my practice and the landscape in both its rural and urban manifestations are central my art. The wild landscape of Shetland where I have lived for 26 years and my ancestral homeland in the industrial Black Country of England are the two key landscapes that shape my creative process. Each area provides extremities and contrasts, and as such my art simultaneously weeps for the world and celebrates the world.

The Black Country was one of the most industrialised regions of the planet and the scars in the land and people run deep in this densely populated region. As a child I grew up amongst the nature of the industrial wastelands and from an early age I developed a deep connection to the birds, fish and trees that live there.

During my teens I drifted away from nature but as I travelled deeper into the complexities of urbanity, I became adrift as a person. As an undergraduate fine art student in the 1980s I could not find a way to make so called ‘serious’ art about the natural world but that dramatically changed one day while working on a 12-foot charcoal dreamscape set amongst the canals of the Black Country.

In part of this drawing a man appeared who was desperately trying to touch a bird that was out of reach. This coincided with an existential crisis as to the nature of art, which had become increasingly pointless to me without any nod towards the growing spiritual awakening that was brewing in my soul and that was physically and emotionally starved of contact with the natural world.

When I moved to Shetland, nature returned to my art and as I immersed in the worlds of the trout and birds they became my teachers. Shetland is dominated by sea sky and birds and its possible to walk all day without seeing another human.

A conflict arose in my art because I could not reconcile the darker side of humanity in my industrial Black Country works with the works inspired by wilderness lands of Shetland where nature was still relatively intact. I drew strength from the German artist Max Beckman who said that ‘there is no utopia without reality’ and my vision started to become unified in terms of exploring dark and light in equal measure as part of the cosmic whole.

The dominant western narrative of the last few centuries has tried to convince us that we are above nature. Our increasingly futile attempts to control nature has led humanity on a perilous path of disconnection from nature with environmental degradation and pollution at crisis levels our world has become an abused place. Mass extinction of species, melting ice caps, floods, famines, fires, habitat loss, pollution, global warming and ultimately climate breakdown are some of the consequences of our disastrous separation from nature.

The birds and fish have expanded my conception of life by teaching me that everything is animate and full of spirit and that everything is connected to everything else. Most importantly they taught me that we are a part of nature and not separate from nature.

Birds are true global travellers that do not know national borders., As they migrate around the planet, they fly over millions of people who are displaced and killed by war, atrocity, famine and injustice. They fly over land and water killed by pollution; they also fly over lands of peace and harmony where ecology is still relatively intact.

Feeling adrift as a species, we desperately clutch our smart phones for answers, searching for a sense of deeper meaning and connection.

If birds could tell us how to live, what might they say?