Resurgence & Ecologist
Issue 243
Jul/Aug 2007
“The range of Paul Bloomer’s art is richly and intriguingly diverse. Early monumental figurative drawings and woodcuts evoke a vision of bitterly constrained English urban life with both compassion and wit. Latterly, there are his Shetland landscapes of turbulent sensitivity and elemental expressionism. Recent narrative paintings set around his home on Shetland show how, after ten years’ living there, the island’s landscape and culture and his own visionary imagination have enchantingly merged.
Born in the Black Country in 1966, Bloomer left school at fifteen to take a job in a factory. After four years there, he “suddenly discovered a love of colour and drawing, which I pursued with energy and drive”. Soon afterwards he enrolled at a local art college. It was while later returning to the factory for summer jobs that he made countless sketches, “intense studies of hands and faces”. A 1988 charcoal drawing based on his mother, A Hand Press Worker, shows her absorbed in a grimly repetitive task, her poignant presence rendered with acute attentiveness.
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