The influences of my work are drawn from places I have experienced. My fascination lies with old walls, urban and industrial, their materials and their eventual decay. The effect

of the elements; air, fire, earth and water. I am fascinated by the ageing processes, surfaces weathered, worn, eroded and sometimes burnt - their history encapsulated.

The process I use involves staining, scratching and scoring the surfaces with incised lines that cut through, sometimes revealing what lies beneath.

Our life experiences are unique and our response to imagery is always personal and transient. I aim to create work that draws the viewer into an atmosphere, a sense of place and an awakening of memories that create and encourages an evolving response to their emotions. Painting is a therapeutic process for me, in them I seek a time and place

beyond that which can be captured in words.

"In the classic Sicilian novel The Leopard, two young lovers explore the rooms of a crumbling palace. In a suite formerly given over to sensuality, they find a wall where ‘the damp had marked the walls high up and also perhaps low down at a man’s height, where it had assumed strange shapes, odd thickness, dark tints.’ Paul Giuffrida, of Sicilian and Welsh descent, captures in his work similar marks left by the passing of people, nature and time through buildings and structures Drawing on his surroundings of industrial decay in Wales and his ancestral background of layered Mediterranean civilisations, Giuffrida’s work comes into being through destructive processes (scratching, scoring, tearing, breaking and burning) as much as the creative (painting, sculpting, binding and nailing). What we are looking may seem at first to be the surface but in fact it is the revealed interior of the work; skinned, gutted and scarred. The resulting careful constructions and considered textures are collages of memory, of long pasts and long shadows. Although we may be looking for the first time, there is a familiarity to the works. If viewers typically see their own meaning in artworks, then in Giuffrida's, perhaps, they can see their own histories."

Andrew Deathe 2006