Paul Woodruffe’s instantly alluring but ambiguous, paintings require a long, slow viewing to appreciate their complexity of composition, games of relationships and abundance of symbols.

His richly coloured and elaborate paintings, contain an assemblage of settings, characters, and motifs – with both disparate and overlapping spaces and forms. They forge unexpected links between history, culture and place, making use of a wide collection of discrete references from the Italian Renaissance, Eastern fabrics, Popular Culture and South Pacific form.

Woodruffe is interested in the use of place and the observer, as a way to provoke memory and imagination, thus generating new thoughts and ideas. He works towards creating a harmony that both contains and shares an applied science of the imagination. Sections of a canvas can be surreal – even otherworldly – while elsewhere there might revisions of history and depictions of more humble activities.

His use of use of high-quality pigments creates an intensity within each painting – often using paintings within paintings.  Layered areas of rich bold tones and metallic pigments become powerful reflectors of light, producing local experiences within an image. In this respect, Woodruffe has created a retinal experience, coupled to a suggestion of narrative. This “dreamlike” mode of painting in which he freely assembles scenes and allusions, Woodruffe offers the viewer multiple, independent reflections on history, heritage, the role of the artist, while speaking to cultural contexts the artist finds himself living in.