When asked to write about Paul Rumsey and his work I looked online to get some background and found a blog that could be said to describe the essence of his work:

“Whoah this is very deep dark shadowy… I love it with a spice of magnitude greatness of scary imagery, and emo skittish art design!”
Personally, I would describe Paul’s work as dark, grotesque, fantastic, macabre, sometimes erotic but always with great attention to detail.
I first came across Paul’s art through a work on display in Chelmsford Museum – ‘Museum Head’ – a stunning piece that allows the viewer to see the museum from within the museum. On joining the museum as Curator of Art I acquired a set of Paul’s prints (from Chappel Galleries) and asked Paul if he would co-curate an exhibition with Waj Mirecki: the dark gothic work of Paul alongside the colourful watercolours of Waj. The resulting exhibition ‘Light and Dark’ was both popular and successful.

Paul travelled a long road of contrariness, defiance and resistance before finding his style. Rebelling at school he showed a talent for drawing and at 16 went to art college in Colchester where his tutors disapproved of his influences which included Alfred Kubin’s Dance of Death drawings and Goya’s Caprichos, Disasters of War and Disparates. Taking a more conventional approach he won a travel award and spent three months travelling around Italy and Austria following his muse. On his return he started a BA at Chelsea School of Art. He still felt out of place, having little interest in abstraction or modern art. In 1977 he left art school and met his wife, the artist Terry Curling. They lived in Fulham, and for the next ten years Paul, encouraged by Terry, painted large figure compositions and drew hundreds of ideas in sketchbooks, developing and refining his own style. Gradually he started to enter competitions and exhibit his work.

In 1989 Terry gave birth to twin daughters and they moved to Wivenhoe, near Colchester. In 1995 Paul visited Chappel Galleries where he has had a number of successful shows. The internet has helped Paul reach an even wider audience and his on-line popularity has led to his drawings being exhibited outside the UK, particularly in France, where his work has been shown alongside drawings by Alfred Kubin at the Abbaye d’Auberive and at the Galerie Béatrice Soulié in Paris.

Paul’s inspiration comes from watching the news, reading papers, books of history, folktales, mythology or from his own imagination or dreams. He draws in charcoal or ink on paper or card, using tones rather than lines. He makes changes and corrections with erasers and sandpaper, working and reworking the picture, looking to perfect the image he has in his head, concealing details in shadows or bleaching them out with a glare of light.

Paul’s work belongs to the tradition of the grotesque and fantastic. He distorts reality in his work by the mixing of forms, changes of scale, elongations, compressions and reversals, a distorted reflection which shows the world in a different light, a different perspective, the world re-imagined in a dream – sometimes erotic – but always stunning, grabbing the viewer’s interest then drawing them in by an ever increasing labyrinth of detail.

Dr Mark Curteis, 2015
Curator of Social History and Art, Chelmsford Museum. 2015