Paul Yates (artist)

Paul Yates is a British poet and artist from Northern Ireland who has worked in the fields of poetry, painting and film for around four decades.[1]

Yates born in Belfast in 1954, His paintings were first exhibited at the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Belfast [2] at the age of 18.

Yates began writing and painting at an early age encouraged by his then high school English teacher, the artist, Jack Pakenham. His first collection of poems and drawings was published in 1974, under the title White Cat with a Human Face,[3] this title was later shown in France in 2019.[4] Many of his paintings and films have their origins in his written work.

Yeats's faced an incident at his school when as a teenager he was expelled for writing a poem during a mathematics examination. He was forced to write on a black board one hundred times, "I must not write poetry in class".[5] A few weeks later the poem concerned was broadcast on BBC Radio by Sam Hanna Bell[6][7] and Yates was reinstated at his school and tabula rasa series of paintings on blackboard was inspired by this incident.[8]

His work title are Sky Made of Stone,[9] Masters of the Canvas,[10] XII Months of Mourne,[11] The Actor's House,[12] and Etudes Vers Un Nouveau Tarot.