A Brief Biography
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A Brief Biography 

(Written by me as if someone else were writing about me.  I don't remember why I did it that way, maybe
 because I read somewhere that you should have your biography on your website or something.) 

Paul Hall, born sometime in nineteen forty-six, did his first oil painting in nineteen fifty-four over a copy a German artist did of the Mona Lisa.  Paul's painting was an abstract of his memory of Frankfort as seen from the rooftop of the apartment building his family lived in on Hammen Strassa.  He had learned to climb the side of the building and get to the roof top.  Roof and tree tops afforded some solace for him as he wrote later in a poem called "The Military-Industrial Complex", "Only those who count out are forgotten, left to the clouds where the silence can be seen in the trees".

The artist who had done the reproduction had lived with his wife and young son, Bambi, in the attic rooms of a large building where young Paul resided in Bad Hamburg a year earlier.  It was a remarkable residence and at the time there were four families living there, two German and two American although prior to the war it was owned by one person.  There Paul would visit the artist, pretending to be only mildly interested.  The spacious room where the artist worked was filled with light and smelled of turpentine and linseed oil.  The artist, himself perhaps in his late twenties, was quite tolerant of the seven-year-old's occasional visits.  Oddly enough, years later in the eighties, a gallery in New York described Paul's work as fitting into a category known as "German Expressionism".  

Life in the post world war two era had plopped the boy right in the laps of the older cultures of Japan and Germany.  For almost six years of his early life, since his father was an officer and could afford servants, the boy was to be on a large part actually brought up by natives of these two nations.  It was said that Paul's first language was Japanese.  This was compounded with the fact that, when in the States, Paul as a boy was mostly growing up and going to school on Army bases which by contrast seemed almost devoid of culture.

This helped to develop a unique kind of perception which was not Paul's alone.  In fact a lot of American children were growing up in these two countries in particular as their parents went about their military duties while stationed in these and other foreign areas in the 40's and 50's.  But it was also his mother's (shown here in the photo) interest in the arts, that helped him become aware of art at an early age.  Good art was affordable in Japan after World War Two and many Japanese artists were doing some great work in oils in the late forties.  Paul's mother collected contemporary as well as classical Japanese art.  

Click here to return to the English Girl detail page.

While attending his second high school in Danbury Connecticut (his first was in Charleston, South Carolina), Paul developed a keen interest in chemistry and physics.  It was then he began work on his theory of gravitation based on the expansion of the universe.  In 1963, he and another student had begun work on a computer that would use a trinary rather than a binary system, thus affording it the capability of dealing with probability. 

But during his routine visits to the laboratories after school, he noticed the art room across the corridor. When he began to also visit there as well, the teacher, Richard Gubernick, quickly saw past Paul's feigned indifference.  Summer school that year was to be taken up with typing, short hand and geology.  The next year, though, was when Paul began to gravitate more and more toward the fine arts, and, with the crowded high school on split sessions, he found the afternoons free to pursue art until everyone left and the janitor finally would have to ask him to leave. 

No one in those days, least of all Paul, understood about learning disabilities.  It wasn't understood then why someone with above average intelligence and a penchant for learning should be such an under achiever.  In reality, Paul budgeted his time, unconsciously realizing he only had time to do three of seven homework subjects each night and then only if he stayed up till one in the morning.  Thus doing, he managed to maintain a C minus average and graduated one year late.  The most discouraging thing were the tests at school:  it was pointed out to him how slow he was and that he would only get them partially done.  He would also loose points on his test scores because of spelling mistakes.  His guidance councilor recommended he go directly into the army, but his art teacher recommended that he apply to art schools instead. 

Paul was accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design, but since they were full for the year, he was accepted for the following scholastic year.  But he had also applied to and was accepted to the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he began attendance in the fall of nineteen sixty-five.  At the end of the first year, he joined the Army because of the escalation of the Vietnam conflict and the reinstatement of the draft in earnest. At the time he was convinced that the conflict had a potential to widen into a world war and that it would be better for him to go through it sooner than later.

Photo to the right is Paul in his studio in Bedford Street, West Village, New York City, 1965.  The instrument in the corner is the koto which came from Japan.  Paul never learned to play it, but his mother did.  On the wall is some of his artwork including a quickly-done portrait of Shakespeare.  One of the guache paintings, in black in the center of the wall, survives to the time of this is being updated, August seventeen of ought one.  

Self Portrait (from memory), walking beside Grammercy Park with back pack and paint box.  1965 (Greenwich Village Period)

At the end of his three years of service, Paul again applied to the Rhode Island School of Design and was rejected.  He was accepted to the California College of Arts and Crafts and attended just one semester before exhausting his army savings and being unable to get any local work because of a severe recession, hitch-hiked to New York to drive a cab until he saved enough to head to France and apply to L'Ecole Superior Des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he was accepted but denied the GI bill by the State Department because of the student riots in Paris three years earlier.

Paul finally found an institution he could afford to attend on the G.I. bill only and which was allowed by the State Department, and that was Oxford University in England, where he was accepted and attended for one year only.  By that time it occurred to him that while studying in a school, he was in fact studying the past while to study the present, it would be necessary to venture forth and find out for himself.  Thus began an odyssey of over two hundred thousand miles and twice around the world.  

Click here to return to return to the Artwork Directory

Click on the following links to go there:

Paul Hall art home page

Artwork by Paul A. L. Hall

A brief biography of artist Paul A. L. Hall.  Actually it's an autobiography made to read like a biography.

email address:  art@paulhallart.com