Arts / Artist Paul Bloomer’s work takes Flight at exhibition celebrating ’25 years of creativity’
“Shetland has been more than my home – it’s been my teacher, my sanctuary, and my collaborator. In its wild winds and endless horizons, I discovered not just the landscape and friendships, but new layers of myself. Shetland has reshaped me as an artist and I’m grateful to celebrate 25 years of creativity.”
A major retrospective exhibition, Flight, celebrating 25 years of artist Paul Bloomer’s Shetland artwork opens this weekend at the Shetland Museum and Archives.
Flight reflects the many migrations and changes in Paul’s life as an artist and is a testament to the forces that have forged his creative career.
His artistic journey began in his ancestral home in the heavily industrialised Black Country in the Midlands of England. Stemming from a working-class family born amongst the grime and intensity of iron and steel-based factories, he broke free from the chains of industrial slavery to become an artist. Securing a place at the Royal Academy School in London in the early 1990’s enabled him to express his unique artistic voice bringing the dark imagery of the chaotic, violent life within his Black Country roots into the light of a defined, powerful creative form.
Feeling adrift in an urban landscape and visions of a northern sky dancing in fire and ice led to him migrating north to Shetland in 1997. The intensity of the fiery Simmer Dim sun contrasted with the cold, dark, Northern sea re-oriented him into visualising images of the extremities of light and dark and bringing forth a pallet embedded within the wildness of the Shetland landscape. For the first two years living in Shetland, he painted outside, mostly in darkness, internalising the sea, the land, the northern lights and especially the birds. He expresses of this time how he “allowed Shetland to be my teacher and let the land teach me how to paint her.”
Using watercolours, oil paints as well as woodcut prints and etchings enabled him to convey the magical dancing of light in his ‘Mirrie Dancers’ paintings, and ‘Bigton sunsets’ opening the doors to a magical realm where nature became his muse.
Birds feature extensively in Paul’s work. He feels they are “symbolic messengers which to me symbolise freedom, because I had lived in a very oppressed urban culture, but when I came to Shetland I felt utterly free. They helped me to compose my pictures because I grew up in an urban landscape dominated by vertical buildings and people, but the birds became rhythmical dancers in my art.”
As he spent more time watching and studying the migration and life of birds that flew into Shetland, they inspired him to consider the premise that, ‘if the birds could tell us how to live what would they tell us?’
“These birds that fly over landscapes shaped by war, famine, injustice, genocide also fly over lands of peace and harmony like Shetland. These are global travellers that know no national boundaries.”
Birds representing the human soul and our capacity for imagination and to soar above the human condition is a metaphor contained within his work such as Dance of the Red Necked Phalaropes and Song of the Skylark. Using paint and colour to reflect the return of light in the spring from the darkness of a Shetland winter, the birds convey a celebration of life and an expression of a cyclical way of being so desperately ignored in our modern, technological world separated from the seasons.
Paintings of nature in communion feature strongly in this exhibition. Whereas in earlier years Paul’s work was very strongly influenced by Christian perspectives of human prayer and spirituality such as his egg tempura paintings of They came to pray and Distant Rainbow, where the chapel forms the centre of the painting. In later years he began to question Christian doctrine painting Sheep without a Shepherd, using vibrant magenta as a guiding light into a new form of divine expression exploding into colourful intensity and a cathartic release of that spiritual searching into a more nature-based, earth-centred creative prayer.
Fusing early Celtic Christian symbolism with nature-based spirituality led him to paint The meeting of the waters in 2008, a visual representation of the tombolo at St Ninian’s Isle where the waters create interlaced patterns of spirals and circles containing the sacred energy that early Christians venerated in the chapel whose ruins remain there.
This cyclical expression continued as Paul combined his art with angling, exploring the many lochs around the Isles. He explained that “the fish taught me the power of the circle. When the trout rise, they kiss the surface of the water, releasing concentric circles. From seeing the circle, I realised it has no beginning or end and I applied thisto my paintings where the circle took centre stage.”
Fishing in the remote, wilder parts of Shetland led him to discover the many tiny islands within lochs which contain ancient ecosystems and remembering’s of a time before sheep were the dominant inhabitants. His series of mixed media paintings Fertile Island celebrate these as places of sanctuary which to Paul also represent a “place of sanctuary within the storms of humanity which in a global context are portrayed in tiny islands of peace and harmony.”
Living upon these tiny islands are small relic native trees, such as birch and willow, which Paul identified as symbols of the Tree of Life but also the power of nature’s renewal and sacredness which Shetland contains within the land as a beacon of hope that life will continue to renew itself, if given the opportunity to do so.
These large, bold, paintings invite us into the magical, ethereal world which Shetland contains within her wild landscape. Their intensity is similar to the American abstract paintings of Mark Rothko who also invites the viewer into another dimension which can be spiritual, and hold a space for emotional and contemplative meditation.The power of colour to commune emotional resonance and expression strongly pulls us into Paul’s visual prayer for the land, for nature and for creation, a spiritual beckoning for our souls to enter and remind us the physical landscape runs far deeper than surface level and is a conduit for spiritual connection.
The spiritual vibrancy of his later work is intensified by his use of Shetland pigment from a site where brown iron oxide oozes from rock which he dried and mixed with oil using it as a glaze to enhance the spirit of the land and is beautifully illustrated in his Water Song paintings where vibrant turquoise pigment radiates the song of water as it flows across the land.
Entering into Da Gadderie feels very much like entering a cathedral where Paul’s paintings resemble stained glass windows offering us a glimpse into the soul not only of the man himself but the soul of the Earth. They invite us to slow down, reflect and envision a world of peace and harmony which the birds sing to us of daily and bring a symbol of joy and celebration.
For now, Paul is taking time out from the intensity of his 25 years of art that has created an incredibly vast body of work to pause and reflect before he continues on his artistic journey through life. He asks that these paintings “give hope to people, life and what is buried in our hearts in what it is to be human to live on this earth.”
The book, Flight: Art, Nature and a Journey through Shetland, by Paul Bloomer is on sale from the Shetland museum.
A gallery talk and tour from 2-4pm today (Sunday) is now sold out. However on Thursday 30 October from 7-9pm, Paul will give an artists talk about his work in the Shetland museum auditorium. Tickets are available from the Shetland museum box office.
By Alex Purbrick
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