About Paul McKee

Paul McKee was born and raised in Liverpool, England.  He exhibited a facility for drawing from a young age and regularly had pictures displayed in the local newspaper and helped teachers draw tricky things like maps, on blackboards, whilst still in short trousers.

A lot of free time was spent, with friends, roaming the wonderful free museums and galleries of Merseyside. Seeing Rembrandts, Cezannes and Gainboroughs alongside stuffed polar bears and models of great ships,  he set his heart on becoming an artist.

Paul took a Foundation Course at Liverpool College of Art and was taught by Maurice Cockrill RA, who later went on to run London’s Royal Academy Schools and by photo-realists, Sam Walsh and John Baum.  He went to Exeter College of Art to study for a BA hons in painting, but returned to Liverpool to complete his studies. Following a period spent painting in Cornwall, Paul took a teaching post in Somerset, before spending many years working in museums and galleries.  Throughout this time, going back to the seventies, he painted and exhibited regularly in the UK.

Paul’s early paintings are in an urban figurative tradition, but time spent learning from Rose Wylie and Roy Oxlade, inspired a much freer and expressive style.  Thematic work followed based on myths and stories, alongside nudes and still-lives and in recent years landscape and seascapes have become a dominant theme.

Paintings in oils and watercolour, collages and drawing in ink, charcoal and crayon are to Paul, expressive interpretations of experiences, feelings and memories. The Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Anna Saunders said:

Working in the tradition of British romantic landscape painting, ( Paul is inspired by Palmer, Turner and Piper), and energised by a fresh perspective, McKee’s haunting, and memory-infused, work is invested with an abstract twist – making the paintings suggestive, dream-like and full of poetry.  

Paul McKee says:

Making art is never easy – it is hard won. We do it, because we have to, in order to communicate genuine feelings and responses to what we see and experience. 

I am a member of Cheltenham Group of Artists and Gloucester Contemporary Artists and exhibit regularly in the UK.