Paul McDowall British-American, b. 1967

Born in Liverpool and based in New York for over three decades, Paul brings a designer’s precision and a storyteller’s instinct to his painting practice. His long career as a creative and graphic artist shapes his measured approach to colour, composition, and the framing required within both.

Working beyond the figurative, his paintings move toward the uncanny and the metaphysical, spaces where emotion takes precedence over depiction. He creates contemplative, distilled scenes that invite pause, placing his subjects within a landscape that refines, refracts their psychological state and condition.

Influences such as Giorgio de Chirico, David Hockney, and Eric Fischl echo subtly throughout the work, yet his visual language remains distinctly his own. Symbolic motifs recur: the stillness of swimming pools, the silence of vacated buildings, the spaces caught between competing animating presences some human some distinctly not. Water, in particular, becomes a site of reflection and immersion both literal and psychological.

At the core of his practice is an interest in discontinuity. His subjects and settings exist in a threshold state, suspended between what is known and what is felt. Through deliberate composition and symbolic cues, he reaches toward meaning that lies beyond appearance yet is exemplified with it, exploring the existential terrain where we we all exist experiencing both clarity and uncertainty.