A contemporary artist from Western Australia who explores the landscape in oils and the figure in charcoal.
Soft billowing clouds, floating high above a hazy landscape of red earth, bush scrub and violet hills – so describes the atmospheric oil painting that won Paul Innes the celebrated Artist in focus award in the 2019 Joondalup Community Art Exhibition. The work has a wonderfully loose, painterly application and a mature use of colour that brings to mind the expressive light-filled landscape paintings of British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner.
It is no surprise then, that Innes himself was born and raised in Scotland, in the picturesque town of Fife, and was exposed early on in his artistic endeavours to the work of legendary artists such as Turner, during a work placement at the National Galleries of Scotland. This experience further ignited Innes’ existing artistic passion and as a result, his future studies in Business became focused on the creativity inherent in Strategic Marketing.
Immigrating to Perth in 1998, with his wife and two young sons, Paul further pursued a career in design and marketing, before more recently focusing his efforts full-time into his arts practice. Innes’ paintings are built slowly - composition and colours are worked out through rough drawings, then further refined via several base layers of acrylic paint, before a final textural application of creamy oils. Each piece is a celebration of local scenes – landscapes, still life, abstracts – through the eye of an artist whose painting career is just Beginning to Start.