Paul Elson was born and brought up in Manhattan. During college, and before graduating as a Philosophy Major from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1967, he studied twelve months in Paris as an art student. It was in Paris that he acquired a lifelong appreciation for what he calls "discernible art"---favorite practitioners of which include Praxiteles, Brunelleschi, Rembrandt, and Seurat. After graduation from Antioch, the path of Art and Philosophy led to the U.S. Navy, where Paul became an officer and a pilot---he maintains he already was a gentleman... Five years later, after two tours in Vietnam where he received personal decorations for valor in combat, he was discharged from Active Duty. While flying in the Naval Reserve, he began his career as a photographer in 1975 in New York City.

Paul's commercial photography clients include a score from the Fortune 500. He specialized in architecture, travel and food, and thoroughly enjoyed the worldwide voyages on which he was dispatched by the hotel chains, cruise lines, and travel and food magazines that are household phrases in the American lexicon. He won the advertising industry's equivalent of the Oscar, the Andy Award, in the late 1980's for an advertising campaign for Ciba-Geigy.

In 1999, Paul's path diverged from its extremely successful photographic course. With talents refined during his commercial career, he developed a unique artform he calls Photo Impressionism. It involves creating an image photographically or with watercolor paint, digitizing it, enhancing elements within it in the computer, and producing a print. Paul will paint or draw on the print, rephotograph and rescan it, and there could be several iterations of this sequence before the image is finalized.

And because in its final form, the image is a digital file, Paul can print the image himself with the latest digital technology. To Paul, this ability to create and control all stages of the image from beginning to end is one of the most rewarding aspects of digital technology, and why he has so thoroughly incorporated it into his creative process.

The response to his creations has been exceptionally gratifying---several of his images are being published as posters by Graphique de France; three galleries in Australia are very successfully selling his work; a one man show began in Taipei in Fall 2000; and fourteen 30 x 40 images were shown and sold for a year at The Cupping Room Café in New York's SoHo District. He returned there in March through September 2002 with another solo show of his new images; additionally, a solo show began in Berlex Pharmaceutcal's gallery in mid-December 2001. And he exhibited his work in The Clayton and Liberatore Gallery in the Hamptons, starting Memorial Day weekend, 2002.

His work has stimulated interest a bit further afield, too---Paul was pleased to accept an invitation from The Chinese Ministry of Cultural Affairs to lecture in August 2002 in Beijing about his art and its process. In 2005-2007, he was invited back to make four additional trips, one during each season, to China's Yellow Plateau. The experiences are indelible, as this region is so infrequently traveled by foreigners that Paul was the first Caucasian to step into several of the villages he documented. As a guest of the president of China's largest photographic society, he is collaborating with him on a book which will be published before the 2008 Olympics.

His originality has not gone unnoticed outside the eclectic confines of the art world: the editors of Popular Photography were so impressed with the innovative technique, execution, and image quality of Paul's work that he was selected as the subject of a comprehensive article published in Summer of 2001. In October 2001, equally taken with his esthetic approach and expertise, the editors of Digital Imaging Magazine selected his image, titled Monsoon, for commendation and, for budding digital artists, analysis. And in September 2003, Paul was again featured in another national magazine. In a four page article in Petersen's Photographic, his art and the technique he developed, Photo Impressionism, were examined and highly praised.

2005 brought him additional recognition in Great Output magazine, where, in the May issue, one of his China images was the cover shot, and he was quoted extensively about his art in a four-page story inside. His images were also the subject of a two page story in Studio Photography and Design in the June 2005 issue. And over Memorial Day weekend in New York City, he won the Landscape Award in The Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit in Greenwich Village---an award he also won in 2004.

More recently, Paul was featured in a five page section of a book published in July 2006: Digital Collage and Painting: Using Photoshop and Painter to Create Fine Art, by Susan Ruddick Bloom. Paul was interviewed and asked to show, in step by step fashion, and explain the process involved in creating one of his images: The House on the Dune, which can be found in his web portfolio. His inclusion in this book indicates the prominence of his place in the digital art world, and the talent he has demonstrated in creating a new art form.

Most recently, in the February 2008 issue of Shutterbug Magazine, Paul was lauded as a "poet'" for the evocative and haunting quality of his images.
In April 2009, Paul has been invited and will display twenty of his 70" images in a solo exhibition in Richmond, VA at The Cultural Arts Center at Glen Ellen.

During a different interview, for an art magazine, Paul was asked to comment on what he might recognize as the inspiration for his remarkable creations: "So many of our most memorable moments are etched from the most fleeting instants in our life---a journey of chiaroscuroed recollections, a gallery of images and sounds long remembered by their effect in that instant. I am fortunate to be often told that I am able to communicate these fleeting moments in my images, and that communication is a connection I highly prize."