Flight: a memorable journey through the life and work of Paul Bloomer

His Portrait of the artist as a young man, set among the district’s slag heaps, evokes dysfunction: a friend of the artist lies dead, beaten up by skinheads; two other men fight; a drug dealer plies his trade; but on the bridge, a couple kiss against the light, offering a glimpse of another reality.

However, Paul looked beyond the factories and mines, and the violence, finding fascination in the natural world that thrived in former industrial sites. He learned about birds and their habitats, and the threats to their survival from agricultural change, pesticides and urban development. In the area’s canals, he fished for pike, roach, perch and tench. Birds and fish, he says, became his teachers, and – as we’ll see – subjects of his art.

Despite the support of a loving family, his later teens were marked by “a period of dark depression”, despair and detachment. There was an unsuccessful attempt to become a boxer, but relief did come in the Northern Soul music scene, which “became like a religion”, and from developing an interest in sketching; he’d been good at art in school.

Nevertheless, real escape from his travails seemed impossible. Two things happened to enable it. A visit to a friend in Manchester revealed a student life which Paul found instantly appealing; and his younger brother, still at school, was immersed in A-level art “and he often seemed to have a pretty girl on his arm”.

A complete change of direction followed, opposed by friends and family. He studied at Dudley College, followed by art schools in Stourbridge and Nottingham. He developed his drawing skills and ventured into new techniques, including the woodcuts that would become one of his trademarks. Large-scale charcoal works, such as Children of the furnace, depicted “the harshness of industrial life and its effect on the human psyche”. He meanwhile expanded his knowledge of art movements such as German expressionism.

The quality and power of Paul’s work attracted praise, and the attention of the Royal Academy of Art in London, where he succeeded in gaining a place. Before moving there, however, he had begun to find new ways of looking at the world. Formal religion hadn’t been part of his spiritual life but he started to embrace prayer. For a time, he left behind those dark, narrative charcoals and explored colour, drawing inspiration in nature from London’s parks. He also undertook work in egg tempura, etching and printmaking, returning to Black Country themes.

The contrast and conflict between colourful spirituality and dark industrial “life and strife” were to feature in his work for many years, and after leaving the Royal Academy, he spent time again in his former haunts. The charcoal works reveal complete mastery of texture and tone, and sometimes for their scale: Journeyman is twelve feet wide.

But, in 1997, a new chapter opened. He had become friends with another artist, Fiona Burr, and she suggested they spend some time in Shetland to look after her sister’s dog.

As he puts it:

…the very second I set foot on Shetland, I felt a sense of homecoming and deep connection to the land that was hard to explain…I immediately recognised the brooding, glowing sky of fire and ice from the vision that had somehow called me north, and I felt that I had found a way home...I felt like I had arrived in paradise.

This was an entirely novel environment, with low-lying landscapes lacking the stark, vertical elements that he was used to, and he searched for a language that would interpret his new surroundings and his developing spirituality. It was a landscape that had little in common with that of the Black Country, though it’s notable that both areas are UNESCO Geoparks because of their geological diversity.

Shetland offered entirely different stimuli. It’s a land rich in wildlife – birds and fish especially – and big skies. The contrast between that new environment and the darker impressions formed in his youth became a recurring theme, “exploring dark and light in equal measure”. As he has put it, his art simultaneously weeps for the world and celebrates it. His chosen media included charcoal, etching, oils, watercolour and - as in the example below, woodcut.

Observation and representation of birds increasingly lent structure and pattern to his compositions and enabled him to celebrate life. Gannets, arctic terns, ducks, herons, migrating bullfinches and many more were to become motifs.

Fish, too – especially the trout that he sought in Shetland’s myriad lochs – also became a theme, the ripples they created leading him to work with circles in a way he hadn’t previously, breaking away from linear forms. Sand eels, as in the example above rendered in charcoal, also feature. And, when angling in the wilderness of Shetland’s moorland and hills, he found deeper, spiritual meaning and new artistic directions, not to mention new friendships.

For a time, he worked on a fish farm, feeding the fish. That experience inspired a woodcut.

In 1998, Paul was appointed as a lecturer at the University of the Highlands and Islands’ campus in Lerwick, leading the foundation and BA Honours Fine Art courses.

He continued to develop his personal philosophy, with his concerns about the world’s environment, and particularly the oceans, foremost in his thoughts. He challenges the “dominant western narrative” that we are above nature, seeing our society’s attempts to control it as futile. Instead, he says, we have become separated from it:

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.

In contrast, those observations of birds and fish in the skies and lochs of Shetland have expanded his outlook, teaching him that “everything is animate and full of spirit, and that everything is connected to everything else”. He refers in his book to his search for the “tree of life”, and notes an irony in that, in Shetland, where trees are generally scarce, he came closest to that ideal when exploring Shetland’s lochs. On small islands in these, there are relict trees that have survived the weather and every form of human interference, offering a timeless link to the past. These inspired Fertile Island.

He was also influenced by the conflicts then making headlines across the globe, from the 9/11 attacks in New York to the war in Bosnia; and he points out that birds are witnesses to conflict, injustice and their consequences, but they also fly over lands at peace where the environment is relatively intact.

He made many small sketches during the Iraq war around the time his daughter, Alice, was born; each day, one of these evoked the violence and the other captured the tranquillity of Shetland nature. He also made a large-scale charcoal image, How then shall we now live?, an invitation to ponder the contemporary human condition: a gathering in which people “have turned inward and stopped communicating face to face, instead becoming entranced by the light of their mobile phones and the illusions that they point to”.

He and Fiona renovated an old house in Bigton, in Shetland’s south mainland, creating a very large studio. But he didn’t confine himself there and grew to love working in storms:

It was gale-force winds that really got me animated, and the paintings seemed to paint themselves as the air became charged and alive with energy. The Muckle Barr, a sand bar off Bigton, was a favourite subject. I remember once, when I was painting this in the full force of a westerly gale, my palette lifted skywards and landed on my chest, staining my survival suit Prussian blue from that day on.

It’s clear from first acquaintance with the exhibition at Da Gadderie that all of these thoughts and influences have shaped Paul’s work. There is darkness and light, stark monochrome but also vibrant, rich and extraordinarily luminous colour. The exhibition impresses for its skill and for its scale: seldom if ever has the gallery displayed so many large works, and great credit is due to its curator, Karen Clubb, for its conception and execution, appreciated by the many who attended the opening of the exhibition.

To conclude, here are two more examples of Paul’s Shetland paintings. More work can be seen on his website.

If you’re in Shetland, or visiting, you can see the exhibition until 4 January 2026. Both the book and the show make a deep impression; Paul’s is a very special talent.