Paul Rumsey works in charcoal on paper. He calls his work 'metaphoric realism': “My work belongs to the tradition of the grotesque and fantastic. It is possible to classify the various ways that reality is distorted in this kind of work: the mixing of forms, changes of scale, elongations, compressions and reversals... The word ‘grotesque’ is derived from ‘grottos’, the caves, the buried palaces of Rome, where Renaissance artists discovered fantastical Roman decoration. They adopted this style and it spread throughout Europe. The origins of the grotesque lie in antiquity, the hybrid creatures of mythology, where the forms of nature, animal, human and vegetable even mineral, are mixed together, some of which feature in my drawings.”
