Paul Maximilian Ambrose Kaiser was born with his twin brother Mark in 1971 to Polish parents and from a very early age loved to paint and draw. Even as far back as in the infants school days, the art teachers would proudly hang up the twins paintings within the school corridors and for some reason they would always get you to draw a 'shoe' for your homework or 'the view from a window'…then years later we'd learn about artists like Van Gogh and how he ended up in an Institute then we'd see his paintings in the book and they'd be of his 'Shoes' or 'the view from his window'!! Infant school also brought back so many great memories, even the time we used to play the mittens game, where we'd throw up our woolly mittens onto a wall and see how high we could get them to go!!...Only problem was, we were only about 3 foot high then, so reaching them was a bit of a problem!! We'd have to stand on each other shoulders like the dwarfs in 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' in order to get down our mitts!! Art was also a strong subject through both junior & high schools, but by the high school, he'd discovered oil paints and set about doing his first oil painting. Fortunately the school loved the painting and it stayed up on display in the new library for many years, but unfortunately when we we had a school reunion, it had been thrown into the skip just a week before! In 1987 I left school with six O'levels and a few CSE's under my belt and my plan then was to become a Furniture Designer, as I loved to design and make things out of wood. Our Mum's house is full of my little wooden school projects such as magazine racks, stools and even the infamous 'Spice Rack'!! Look Mum, I've made you this lovely Spice Rack!! 'Wow', she'd say 'I'd always wanted one of those!!.' And so the Careers Adviser steered me over to Art College to let out all of this wooden creativity and pursue my ambition to become this world class furniture designer & maker. I went to Stourbridge College of Art & Design, where I had a taster of 'General Art & Design', 'Textiles Design' and also 'Graphic Design' and so Graphic Design won hands down as Apple Macs were just appearing on the scene. Within this time I also had some great part time jobs including working in a hamburger-shaped kiosk in Kidderminster town centre! Talk about getting noticed! After Stourbridge College, I studied for a Higher National Diploma in Graphic Design down at Swindon School of Art. Wow, it was my first time living away from home and I certainly lapped up the student life - buying clothes from Oxfam and tie-dying them, living off spaghetti on toast and also going to all night house parties! I also had two part time jobs (none of them in hamburger shaped kiosks I must add!!) one was behind a bar and the other stacking shelves in Sainsburys (in the days when the staff used to wear brown polyester uniforms!!). I finished college in 1991, when the country was in deep recession and I applied for every graphic design job, but had so many rejections. I ended up working behind a bar and on the other evenings would do many courses including Quark Xpress & Adobe Photoshop. But even the bar work would bring in the commissions and open up a few avenues for me - I was asked to write the days specials onto the chalkboards and ended up doing a pastel masterpiece of the specials instead! Even some of the locals used to come in on a quiet Sunday evening when I was working and they'd enjoy a quiet pint whilst watching me sketch…'can you tell what it is yet?' As a result, I had many commissions ranging from pencil sketches of wedded couples through to large shop front posters. I then decided to write to all of the advertising agencies again and ask if I could work for no wages, just so I could get agency Apple Mac experience. Then in early 1992 I had a blessed reply from this one small agency in Kidderminster who offered to pay me 75 pounds a week and I was off, my career had began! I worked there for a year and a half, but then an opportunity arose to work as a 'Carpet Designer', up in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Quite a difference from what I was used to doing, but at the time I fancied a refreshing change. I relocated up to Bradford and just couldn't believe how much cheaper everything was up there! I managed to find a Chip shop that sold Fish & Chips for 1.10 and in the local pub a pint of bitter was 90p!! Wow, what a place! Working as a Carpet Designer allowed me to continue using my artistic skills and in the evenings I would do some digital retouching for some local clients on my flatmates Apple Mac. In those days, the internet wasn't so freely available for the home, so all of my work was done by post. I would also find time to do some oil paintings and sketches and at the weekend I 'd be in the Yorkshire Dales walking with friends. I guess that this is what made me want to move to Ilkley as I was in love with the surrounding countryside. Following my short spell as a 'Carpet Designer', I moved back into Graphic Design and worked as the in-house designer for 'Goblin' vacuum cleaners - you could say that I'd worked my way up as I'd gone from carpets up to vacuum cleaners. This of course meant relocating again and so I moved from picturesque Ilkley to the busy old mining town of Wakefield. Whilst working in Wakefield, I had a call from Mum asking Mark & myself to see the Polish priest next time we were down in Kidderminster, because he had a little painting project for us (to see more of Marks work click on www.markkaiserart.com). So when we were in Kidderminster during Christmas 1995, we visited Father Jacek Trochim to see what this little painting project involved as we were so intrigued. 'Father Jack' as he was known brought us into the beautiful Polish church and pointed to the altar wall saying that he wanted a rainbow with a couple of cherubs either side. Well, its not every day that you get to paint a Michelangelo mural altarpiece and we persuaded him to do something far more beautiful and elaborate and that we would go away and come back with a grand design. Both Mark & Myself went away with so much enthusiasm and excitement that we'd been asked to do an altarpiece - for many years from school to art college, we'd studied artists like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and here we were with a chance to paint our own Altarpiece. We kept in contact with Father Jack, presenting sketches and designs and he was loving them and so a date was set for us to begin, which meant erecting scaffolding and also preparing the altar wall, which is about 24 foot high by 18 foot wide - this would be the biggest painting we'd ever embarked on and it was a huge, blank canvas. The designs were based on Titians great works in Venice with a few more additions - as there are a group of cherubs at the top, we'd decided to paint ourselves in as as one of them as we'd actually been baptised at the Polish church. You can see where we are at the point where the yellow beams meet the altar wall and the idea behind this was to say that we are 'helping to support the church'! Then the phonecall came to say that the scaffolding had been erected and the wall prepared, so off we went with brushes in hand and oil paints at the ready! I can still remember the day we arrived with all of our paints & brushes and looking up at the rickety scaffolding which had been erected from wood & rope (just like in Michelangelo's days!) and thinking 'Is this going to be safe?' But after a while, both Mark & myself were like spider monkeys clambering up and down it. And from that day on, we made a pact to get down to Kidderminster every weekend in order to get this huge masterpiece finished - you could say that we'd decided to paint 'religiously'!! (anyway…I'll stick to the day job!!). What a momentous year and a half we would have as Mark lived in London at the time and I was up in Yorkshire. Every weekend Mark would get the National Express to Digbeth and I 'd meet him there in my 25 year old classic Mk1 Escort. To this day, I am really still surprised how that old car did so many miles and never broke down - we reckon its like in that film 'The Blues Brothers', we were both 'On a mission from God!' Father Jack also wanted to keep the painting covered up, so that at the end we could have a grand unveiling, and so after every painting session, we'd have to put up dustsheets - but the parishioners convinced him him to unveil it early as they were old and a few joked that they wouldn't live long enough to see the finished piece! And so a mass was held at the unveiling and the parishioners were amazed and they were coming up to us shaking our hands, baking cakes for us and also this one old man made us Polish potato pancakes! The seasons changed and a the church has an open roof space, we'd wear fingerless gloves and five layers in the harshest of winters and then take in lots of water when working through the summer months. The painting then began to attract lots of media attention and even Polish Archbishop Wesoly, a major figure within the Vatican got to hear of it then whilst on a trip to London, he made special arrangements to visit the painting and celebrated the painting with a mass, which was attended by a full congregation. Its not every day that you get to meet an Archbishop from the Vatican and then after the mass, we had a chance to have a chat and he told me that one of his first stays in England had actually been in Wakefield. This one day when we were painting, I happened to look up and notice that where we had painted over a join, parts of it had started to peel away, so we ended up having to repaint over it - we had a laugh mind you saying that we were restoring our own renaissance painting even before it was finished!! My time in Yorkshire had come to an end and I made the conscious decision to move back to the Midlands in order to be closer to the painting and I worked for an ad agency in Worcester. I would then go over to Kidderminster on a few evenings in order to do a little more on the great painting. We also noticed that at the time of doing the painting, the amount of people which we got to know and the interest which they had in this great painting - people would regularly come in to see us painting on a Saturday and it kind of reminded me of the time when I sketched the chalkboards during my bar job. After a year and a half, the great masterpiece was finished and the press arrived and we appeared in three local papers, then as a result of this, it appeared on ITVs 'Central News', catapulting us within the media spotlight. To see more of the great painting click on www.polishchurch.org.uk . What great years 1995-1997 were!! Whilst in Worcester, I'd continue to sketch and paint as well as digitally retouching within my day job and the great thing about moving from job to job, is the amount of knowledge which you pick up from different work colleagues. With this knowledge, I moved to this fab ad agency in Royal Leamington Spa called 'Helios' and so relocated again and have now settled in Warwickshire. After so many years moving here, moving there, I have finally 'laid my hat and found my home!'. A home with a great view (which I'm not going to sketch...hmmm Van Gogh springs to mind!!) and also close to so much great countryside. Enjoy the rest of my site, Paul Maximilian Ambrose Kaiser