Paul Ware

Paul Ware has a B.A. in religion from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and a J.D. from Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. He has practiced law in Birmingham since 1986. There is a significant spiritual and meditative aspect to his work. He tends to draw his inspiration from classical, religious and decorative imageries, often cross-referenced and linked by his materials and mixed media. There is a great variety of technique, materials and size in Mr. Ware’s work, from tiny, heavily worked and detailed icons to larger, freer figurative canvases including super-sized political portraits.

His smaller works of icons, landscapes and miniature interiors are often executed on irregularly shaped, cast-off pieces of sheet metal, tin, aluminum and copper, then hammered, primed and intricately painted with ink, gouache and acrylic media to give the works an intimate, jewel-like quality.

My father died on January 1, 2013. He had been a multi-year survivor of lung cancer. My mother died about three years ago, and she had been a multi-year survivor of lymphoma. This means, in some sense, that I became an orphan this year. So the opportunity and inspiration to make a collaborative piece with my good friend Gary Chapman, for whom I have tremendous respect and admiration as an artist, and to have the collaboration extend to and involve the broader community of people who have been touched by cancer, seemed like a gift and embrace from a whole new family.

Inspiration