Paul Heaston

Paul Heaston

Paul Heaston is a painter and draftsman, compulsive sketchbook-keeper, blogger, and amateur carpenter and guitarist.  He earned his MFA from Montana State University in Bozeman, and was later a member of the School of Art faculty before returning to his hometown of San Antonio.  He has also worked as a freelance illustrator, a caricature artist and as an art conservation and restoration specialist, and has participated in shows in Montana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Perugia, Italy.

Paul’s portrait work explores the relationships between the sitter, the painter, and the viewer.  His paintings and drawings use this three-way dynamic as a jumping off point to consider more contemporary problems.  The viewer may recognize the clothes, the hairstyles, the ages and genders of his subjects or identify emotionally with a subject’s posture or gaze.  Yet any attempt to otherwise know the subject is confounded by a lack of location and narrative specificity.  While there is little cultural ambiguity, overt expressive and gestural aspects of identity are unclear (if present at all).  The seemingly “complete” presentation of a full standing figure is undermined by the absence of expected cues.  Like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, the people Paul paints seem to wait eternally for an existential conclusion that will never appear.

Paul’s other interests include drawing and painting the urban landscape.  His last project was documenting every building along Bozeman’s historic Main Street in a set of panoramic drawings done on location over the course of 6 months.  He worked through rain, snow and sleet, wasp stings and sunburns and curious onlookers.  The drawings encompass more than 67 buildings, 109 cars and motorcycles, hundreds of windows and thousands of individual bricks.            

Paul is a correspondent for Urbansketchers.com, an international showcase of sketchbook artists, and his personal sketch blog, Three Letter Word for Art, can be found at paulheaston.blogspot.com.  Paul's website can be seen here: www.paulheaston.com.