ABOUT THE ARTIST

ARTIST BIO

Alison Haley Paul is a contemporary painter of lavishly textured landscapes full of nuanced color. Her work conjures up connotations and geographical memories: that summer you spent at the beach, the tree where you went to think, the path up the hill behind school, the view out the car window on the way home. The places she paints may not be physically specific, but they are immediately recognizable. They are pulled from memory, the quiet composition of her passions.

The work seen here is Alison’s passion, the thing she returns to with joy when she’s not sculpting, running her interior design firm, or spending time with her family in Encinitas, California. Alison grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and majored in Art and Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. There she studied ceramics with Byron Temple, a disciple of Bernard Leach, and design with David Lee Brown.

Alison later moved to California and earned a BA in Interior Design at the Design Institute in San Diego. She has been a successful interior designer ever since. But she remains true to her best love, painting. Alison continues to study, most recently at the Athenaeum School of the Arts in La Jolla, where she works with her current mentor, artist Reed Cardwell.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Creativity is a funny thing: it’s not always a bright flame burning inside me. But when it’s there it’s such a thirst, a hunger, a longing, that I cannot ignore it. I create many things – pottery, jewelry, sculpture – but I choose to focus on painting. It is the joy in expression and my reverence for nature that flows from my brain, from my heart, from my soul, down my arm and through the palette knife onto the canvas.

I am moved by the colors and textures of nature. Nature intrigues and soothes. The annual changes in a meadow, lagoon or estuary excite me; I am fascinated by the way everything changes with the time of day, the weather, and the season. I am inspired by the nuances in the skies, the shifting clouds and endlessly varied colors. I have seen and studied many artists, and and been awed by their work, but it is the art and majesty of the natural world that continue to feed my creativity.