Paul Corfield

Paul Corfield was born in Bournemouth, Dorset on the 25th March 1970 and has lived within 10 miles of his birthplace all his life.

I can't remember exactly when it was, but I know I was very young when I first started learning to draw. Detail was always my thing; if my drawing didn't look like the object or scene I was looking at then I would find it a most infuriating experience. In my recent work I have finally escaped those shackles and it's been a very enjoyable and liberating experience; it's only now I finally feel like the artist I'd always wanted to become. The journey here has been an up and down one and at times a real struggle.

After I left school I applied to art college and was accepted, but in the end I had to turn it down and that's where my art career ended for the time being. I would have been training to be a technical illustrator, but with hindsight I think it was good that I didn't pursue that style of painting as within a few years computers would have taken over and producing technical illustrations manually wouldn't have been in demand.

For the next 13 years Paul Corfield worked at an engineering firm and painted in the evenings. It was while working there that he met a girl called Sara who went on to become his wife. She has become a total rock in his life and certainly helped him get to where he is today.

One of those life-changing decisions came in 2002 when the engineering firm I was working for offered the chance of voluntary redundancies. I put my name forward and was accepted. The plan was to use the redundancy money and live off that for a year while I just painted and painted. It was a big gamble as we have two children to feed. Everyone was telling me not to leave work because of that and telling me that no one could make a living from art. My wife was the only person to back me 100%.

After leaving work my passion for realism took over and my works for the next 3 years were highly detailed. If they were to be categorised then it would likely be contemporary realism or photorealism. I was successful in that style and was represented in both London and America. In my spare time though I was developing an idea that has evolved into the landscapes that you see now. I toyed around with the idea for well over a year but it kept being put on the back burner. It however always niggled away at the back of my mind, I just knew there was something in it. So one day I sent off my ideas to Washington Green and they saw something in them too. That was it, I was released, now I could paint real brush strokes instead of hiding them, I had the freedom to create; I could drift off into another world instead of living in a world of realism. So, now you see how I got here, feel free to join me along the way, there's so much more to come.

I tend to have either sketching days or painting days. I rarely mix the two and instead prefer to channel all my creative energy into one or the other. Sketching days will be an all day affair where I put on my headphones, fill my head with my favourite music and the ideas start to flow. If nothings happening I'll change the style of music, maybe some rock or something very soft - I have a very wide range in musical taste. Some days maybe only one sketch will be any good and some days I'll scribble one after the other. Often I rub out lines and rearrange everything until I get a good feeling that the idea is going somewhere. My sketches are fairly complete and I often project them onto the canvas in the transition to starting the painting. Projecting the sketch onto the canvas allows me to copy all the lines and get the exact same feeling on the canvas that I originally had in the sketch. It's a technique I used to use in my photorealist works for getting all that detail.

The start of each weekday revolves around our two children, so it's up early and get them ready for school. At around 8.15am my wife walks them both to school and I make my breakfast and have a coffee. While eating breakfast I check my emails and then it's off to my art studio at around 9.30am. Having an art studio sounds glamorous, but mine is just a small 7ft by 5ft space partitioned off at the end of my garage. It's nice in the summer and cold in the winter when I often work in temperatures of around 5°C. I hope it won't always be like that though.

I work under simulated natural light supplied through a large daylight bulb. I have a break for lunch and then back to painting for the afternoon. Late afternoon I normally have a break for some exercise, I like to keep fit by doing my other love, gymnastics, as sitting or standing all day isn't very energetic. One end of my garage is my art studio and the rest of it is my gym. Early evening I have a light meal, play with the children, get them ready for bed, read them a story and then if the painting is at a stage that allows it I may do more painting till around 9pm. I try and have weekends off to do family stuff and tinker around the garden, but I will paint at least a few hours in any weekend. Painting is just what I was born to do, it has been part of me all my life and I hope it never changes.