Paul Ware

I love patina, age, and decay. Strata showing the passage of time. Urban landscapes inspire and inform my painting. I take note of the patterns of stairs and windows remaining on old firewalls after demolition. The seemingly random placement of phantom windows and doors whose original structure and order have faded in the destruction and reconstruction.

I see the beauty in revealed age and decay. The patina of peeling paint and cracked plaster. The hidden collapse of billboards and signs. These images are a flash and blur from a car window. And I think of the process of my work as “eyes-closed” image memories (almost like short movies). These scenes drive my painting and when a piece really works and comes together for me, I feel that I am seeing behind my eyes.

Paul Ware has a B.A. in religion from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, (1982) and a J.D. from Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia (1986). He practiced law in Birmingham, Alabama from 1986 to 2016 primarily securities and mergers and acquisitions. Now, he is a painter.

“I have always made things; created things. I did that as a way of carving out some small area of control and order in an otherwise chaotic and disordered environment. That is largely what I did in my previous career as a lawyer — taking complex, difficult situations, and bringing order, calm and conclusion to them. I did that good naturedly and with a sense of humor, although there was not much depth of feeling or emotion in the exercise. In fact, it was important to keep emotions in check in those settings. And I did that to an extreme in my profession; which meant that those emotions were being compressed and distilled and were spurting out in my family and private life. And wrecking all of that. Which all came crashing down.  And out of that crash, came my art. I picked up a paint brush. I drew. I made collages. Little of it particularly good. But I was starting. I was doing something. Maybe searching for another voice, when my real voice and words, written and spoken, seemed to fail me. Or, not so much failed me, but were just being used to stab and wound everyone within reach. And now, what I have evolved into is a painter making better art with a way of opening and offering myself. Honest and vulnerable. Instead of lying and wounding.”

Space One Eleven Involvement: Board Member 2005; Suspended in Conflict 2005; Politics, Politics 2006