Paul Holland is currently a full-time teacher of languages at Christ’s Hospital school, West Sussex. He enjoys his work... but a passion for writing and art has led increasingly to private commissions and to a number of exhibitions in various parts of the country.

After studying French and German at Oxford, Paul worked in Italy and travelled extensively throughout Europe. Much of his art is inspired by our built landscape, and this collection of works brings together a wide range of motifs and themes derived from European cultural heritage. More recent treks into remoter parts of the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Scottish Highlands have brought other landscapes into his art, and led to explorations of very different forms and styles.

An extended work of fantasy-fiction lies behind the drawings and paintings based on Atlantis. Designs and views of places and buildings from this long-lost land reflect its mythical rôle in shaping European culture and civilisation. The panorama over Atlantis City itself is based loosely on Plato’s description in his Critias of a series of interconnecting canals,

The extravagance of detail in this particular work is intended, as in the stories it accompanies, to lull the reader/viewer into wondering whether they are in fact encountering an actual place.

This is a theme pursued later in the series of fourteen drawings depicting variations on the English cathedral city, replete with cloisters, closes, ruins, rectories and the later, incremental additions to our cityscapes. These pictures are effectively the illustrations to another unpublished novella written by the artist, Unknown England , and form the basis of the hero’s fictional tour. To this series also belong the view of a public school and the classical design for an urn.

In the more recent paintings, there has been a dual tendency towards both an accurate representation of texture and stonework around actual windows, as well as a distillation of architectural elements into abstracted forms. These are explored in the ongoing series of Gnomic Strips, in which ideas are developed in almost musical, symphonic structures echoing Hegel’s maxim suggesting “architecture as frozen music.”