INTERVIEW Paul Bordiss, artist

ARTISTIC LEANING Paul Bordiss, pictured at his exhibition in the Clew Bay Hotel, Westport. Right: Two paintings in the exhibition.?Pic: Michael McLaughlin

Sweeping brush strokes


Ciara Moynihan

These days, very few artists are working with the brush and canvas full time. Most must have less-colourful jobs to pay the bills. You’ll find them teaching – if they’re lucky – or behind office desks and shop counters, or taking shifts in bars and restaurants. (Something to bear in mind when you’re tipping.)
Still, you don’t often come across an artist who is also a chimney sweep – and who, in a previous life, worked as an artist for the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Gathering Team.
Meet Paul Bordiss, an affable artist from the picturesque Gloucestershire Cotswolds. Paul has been living in Westport for two years, and his days are spent with brush in hand – whether it’s a chimney brush or a paint brush. It’s a combination the artist himself describes as ‘pretty quirky’.  
Paul’s paintings frequently hark back to his rural upbringing, featuring farmyard animals and country vistas. His father was a stockman – he worked on a farm and lived in a ‘tied house’ – a house that was tied to the job. It was a traditional life, with traditional values. Perhaps that’s why Paul is so proud to be a chimney sweep – it’s a traditional job that’s been around for centuries. It’s a skill he learned from his uncle when he was a schoolboy. It’s honest work.
Paul’s parents’ home was nestled into Mickleton Woods, which lie deep in the Cotswolds. Mickleton, the nearest village, sits about nine miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. This is Shakespeare country. Fittingly, Paul’s birth in 1959 in that remote house had a whiff of Shakespearian drama.
“This was before they had phones and all that sort of stuff,” he smiles. “Mum was expected to give birth, but the midwife had gone off, fed up of waiting. While she was away, I came along, and my dad delivered me. He was used to delivering pigs and things, so, you know… The umbilical cord was around my neck, so he had to deal with that too, all in the house in the woods.”
The family later moved to neighbouring Worcestershire, but they remained in the countryside living a rural life – a way of life that was to have such an influence on his art, and from a young age.
“I had always been drawing… When I was at school, I was the one all the children would come up to and ask to draw their pictures for them. They had an art competition every Monday, and in the end they had to exclude me because I was winning it every week,” he chuckles.
In the mid ’70s, at the tender age of 16, Bordiss’s life took a very different turn. He left the landlocked county and its farmyard animals, and joined the Royal Navy as a steward. Already an experienced tuba player, he quickly joined the volunteer band on board HMS London. “When we visited places like Bermuda, we would play on the docks during ceremonies,” he remembers fondly.
When Paul designed a motif for the band’s shirts, his artistic talent was spotted, and before he knew it, he was asked to become an artist on the Intelligence Gathering Team.
“It was about gathering information from ships, enemy ships,” Paul explains. “So if there was an enemy ship – at the time this would have been Russia – we would all have to go up onto the upper deck and gather information. My job was to draw the guns, their placement, the radar, and so on. This was backed up with photographs, but these might not always come out very well if the weather was bad – so, they covered every angle, to get everything that they could.”
When Paul left the Royal Navy in 1980, he carried on drawing and painting with water colours. He soon started working with pastels, and started to concentrate on animals and showing his work in galleries. His paintings started to sell, and then he moved to acrylics – and the paintings continued to sell. “It all evolved from there really,” he says.
His work has since been purchased and trumpted by such illustrious buyers as Mike Bibby, former head of fine art at Cambridge University, and acclaimed sculptor John A Moore. 
What often sets Paul’s paintings apart – and what draws many people to them – is the personality of what he paints. A defiant heifer seems to say ‘what you lookin’ at?’; a lost Highlander bull asks for directions with his eyes; sun-seeking sunflowers jostle the wind and each other for warm light; clouds glow with the rage before they burst on the Reek.
Paul works on dark canvases, painting from dark to light. He takes his cue from nature, from the change over from night to dawn to day. “Gradually things become illuminated. As the sun rises it starts to pick out shapes as they emerge from the darkness. And that’s all I’m doing really. I’m starting from the shadow and then bringing in the sunlight.”  
Paul is really taken with Mayo and the west of Ireland, and is planning to bring local features and scenery into his work more and more.
Paul’s ‘day job’ as a chimney sweep has also had an influence on his work. Over the years, he has collected all sorts of weird and wonderful objects that he has found in dark, sooty spaces and in crows’ nests, and he hopes to to do a series of artworks on chimneys and crows – no doubt filled with the wily personalities of these highly intelligent birds.
Meanwhile, he is working illustrations for a children’s book ‘Zinnia, Warrior Princess Pig’, by Westport woman Linda Newman, due outin March. Co-incidentally, Linda runs a shop in Westport, Leaping Lizard, where Paul Bordiss-designed merchandise is available – everything from coasters and chopping boards to mugs and greetings cards. His merchandise can also be found in the Mood Gallery in Castlebar. Bordiss is also a member of the Greenway Artists, and he occasionally runs art workshops in the Westport area.

An exhibition of work by Paul Bordiss is running at the Clew Bay Hotel until the end of February. Paul will be at the hotel tonight (Tuesday) and tomorrow night, between 6pm and 7pm, should anyone wish to meet to him.