Paul Blomkamp South African , b. 1949

"In 1979 (when I was 30 years old) I contracted Legionnaires disease from drinking water on a golf course. Within a week I ‘died’. The resultant near death experience transported me to a place where energy and its workings was revealed to me in such utter detail and clarity that it drastically changed the way I look at everything.. life and death.. and painting.

What I witnessed and experienced was the very details of immensity. I had fallen into a sea of seething electrical activity where the light was brighter than bright."

“There are no words to describe the invisible I see. There is just the painting I paint in a sacred place. A place free from race or culture. Free from religion or philosophy. A place free from any definition of who I am. I paint in the ‘clouds of unknowing’ and as an old 14th Century monk said, ‘when you are in the clouds of unknowing then everything is illuminated.’

Paul Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1949. He spent 20 years creating stained glass windows and at 19 years of age was awarded with a commission to create the largest stained glass window in the world at the time.

The stylized nature, attention to detail and master craftsmanship required in stained glass windows combined with his desire to paint the invisible has given his artworks a unique Blomkamp style.

While he effectively ended his stained-glass career in 1993, his works still evoke the haunting distribution of light as a transmitter of energy rather than a reflector.

Paul has an unquenchable thirst for energy: energy transmitted through light, colour and texture. If anything, his work can be described as transcendent - visual masterpieces created outside of time and space to truly encapsulate the ultimate physical motivator in our universe: energy.

His works grace numerous private, public and corporate collections including the State Theatre in Pretoria, Absa Bank, the Greek Orthodox Church in Rosebank, Telkom, Investec, 3M, Kellogg’s and others.

Paul has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions both locally and internationally.

Whether it be slashes and dashes of straight lines of vivid colour, intimate scenes of domestic tedium or the holiness of light flowing through a stained-glass window, Paul Blomkamp’s artworks reveal a desire to make visible that which is often obscure.