Paul Dene Marlor – Prize Winning Artist Five Years On

Five years ago Paul Dene Marlor was voted Professional Artist of the Year. He’s still amazed at the award from The Society for All Artists (SAA), who have 40,000 members worldwide and were judging more than 6,000 entries.

‘Yeah, it was a bit of a shock,’ he confesses. ‘I obviously didn’t expect it.’ He didn’t let it go to his head and he can’t quite now remember where he put the engraved crystal trophy presented to him at the Design Centre in London.

But it did change him.

The water colour, a street scene next to the Town Hall on wet day in his native Halifax, was one he had done for his own amusement and it marked a turning point. Not only did it bring him fame and recognition but it gave him confidence to persist with a new style with which he was experimenting. ‘It was looser than normally, more impressionistic,’ he explains. ‘I think I was going that way at the time, starting to use a wet into wet style.’ By this he means the application of wet paint onto wet paper, letting it bleed and run to create unusual effects.

This is his simple explanation of how he achieved something quite extraordinary, the teary limpidity, the poetic translucency, of a quite magical work of art. It’s a painting that somehow eternalises a moment, a civic building magnificently gilded, the street a Venetian canal if two people were not walking on it, the lady sheltering under a red umbrella that would have caught the eye of Vettriano. It takes a great artist, a poet, to see the beauty, capture the way sensory perception may be heightened when a natural element blurs the everyday, transmutes it beyond the ordinary.

‘This was a watershed moment for me,’ he says, with no obvious intention to pun. ‘I was doing okay before, selling well in galleries but this allowed me to move to another level.’

We see the same impressionistic fluidity taken a stage farther, perhaps, in one of my favourite paintings of the many he has done. Here we see the bare ruined ribs of Bolton Priory reflected in the brown water of the Wharfe, an archetypal Yorkshire scene. It’s one of those soft days of early Autumn, of thin sun and long shadows, just as green is giving way to gold, moodily evoked, distilled dewily, eternalised. It breathes a sense of dreamy calmness. The ancient ruined building, perfectly in harmony with nature, has become almost a part of it.

Paul started painting in 1985 more or less as soon as he left school, in Elland, where he believes he received very little guidance and no inspiration in art lessons. He’s entirely self-taught, from magazines, television programmes and books of which he now has a large library. He continued his education at Percival Whitley College, in Halifax, and Dewsbury and Batley Art College, studying to become a graphic designer which he was until 2007. At that point after some health issues and to keep up with the number of commissions he was receiving - not least from America where they have a fancy for his large-scale wildlife portraits - he chose to become a full-time artist. He has never looked back since.

In 2010, he discovered a love of and aptitude for teaching - and for the past three years has been increasingly occupied with workshops and demonstrations all over the country, so much so that he has had to limit himself to fifty a year, fearing they were taking him away from his art. This came about after people saw him demonstrating at Patching’s Art Centre, Nottingham, at one of their famous festivals dedicated to bringing home to ordinary people the joy of painting. After that he found himself in great demand.

He does about 25 paintings a year and they may be found hanging in several local galleries: the Yorkshire Gallery in Halifax Piece Hall; Harrison Lord, Brighouse; Studio 9, Elland and the Village Gallery, York. You might come across them in galleries across Scotland and Cornwall where he is fond of taking painting holidays with his wife, Catherine who handles all his bookings and business dealings.

A visit to his fascinating website will allow you to explore the sheer diversity of his paintings which range in subjects from the majesty of the Ribblehead Viaduct to a prowling Bengal Tiger, from snow-capped Stainland to a dreamy seascape looking across to Gigha and Jura, from a Golden Eagle to Gibson’s Mill in Cragg Vale. You can buy signed prints and even easels specially designed by Paul.

‘I feel I am always striving to improve on my last painting,’ this most modest of men tells me tells, thoughtfully. ‘I know this will be something that will be a life-long challenge for me, I am always learning.’

He feels he would now perhaps like to concentrate more time on wildlife paintings, experimenting with different media and substrates and in foreign travel. ‘We were booked to go to Italy this year and I had intended bringing back lots of reference material to work from - but that has all changed for the moment with the coronavirus.’

So how does it feel to know his work is proudly displayed in galleries and people’s houses. ‘Being the best I can at whatever I set my mind to is what I strive for.’ He smiles warmly. ‘My ambition is to continuously create great artwork I am proud of and that people would want to adorn their walls with.’

Paul’s work can be seen at: https://www.pauldenemarlor.com/