Paul Yates has sustained a highly original and compelling creative output over some four decades across poetry, painting and film-making attracting international connoisseurs of the Avant-Garde. Several volumes of his poetry have been published with translations in French, Danish, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. His paintings feature in various public and private collections and his film works have won international awards.

Yates began writing and painting at an early age encouraged by his then high school English teacher, the artist, Jack Pakenham. In 1972, at just eighteen years of age the first exhibition of his paintings was held at the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Belfast. In 1974, A WHITE CAT WITH A HUMAN FACE, his first collection of poems and drawings was published. In 1976, under the auspices of surrealist aficionado, Sir Roland Penrose, his drawings were exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, where he also read from his second collection of poems and drawings, SKY MADE OF STONE.

From early in his career Paul Yates has signed his paintings with a ‘mark’ as he felt a formal signature intruded on compositions. Over the years this ‘mark’ has evolved into a rune like cypher which has come to symbolise the inherent enigma of Yates’s works and is now the artist’s personal monogram. Intensely private, Paul Yates declines interviews, preferring that his work speaks for itself.

Her Majesty Queen Polythenia by Paul Yates

Bespoke Frames Fine Grain Canvas Print

Image Size; 32 x 40 cm

Framed Size; 49 x57 cm

Framed in contemporary black wood grain frame.

Inspired by the artist’s chance encounter with scarecrow figures on the Ard’s Peninsula in Northern Ireland. The subjects were made from lightweight baling polythene and plastic bags, scraps of the former snaring at random on barbed wire fences suggested musical scores.