The Walls of Roma

Photographs and Paintings by Paul Jacob Bashour

A study in texture, memory, and time.

It began with a walk through Roma. While exploring the Eternal City, Paul Jacob was drawn not only to its iconic monuments and architecture but also to the quiet poetry of peeling surfaces, faded frescoes, fractured stone, and weathered facades that told their own stories. These overlooked details held a stillness and a beauty shaped by time that asked to be remembered.

As a visual artist drawn to texture, depth, and the layered language of abstraction, Paul Jacob had come to Italy to travel and study the great masters of the centuries. Yet it was the worn architecture itself that captured his imagination, revealing stories waiting to be discovered within the walls of

Roma.

Fascinated by these silent narratives such as stained plaster, fractured stone, and peeling layers of history, he began photographing them as one might sketch, finding visions of art in their quiet de-cay. This was a way to observe, preserve, and understand.

The photographs soon became a collection unto themselves, poetic fragments of a city in quiet transformation. But the story did not end there.

Back in his Los Angeles studio, Paul Jacob returned to these images not as documentation but as inspiration. From them emerged a new body of paintings, abstract and textured works that reimagine Roma's architectural decay through the language of paint, plaster, and gesture. Elevating erosion into elegance and memory into art, The Walls of Roma is both a photographic archive and a painter's meditation, a dialogue between two mediums rooted in place, time, and transformation.

This collection features a series of original paintings alongside more than 200 photographs exploring the material memory of Roma. Each work invites viewers to see the Eternal City through a new lens, one that finds beauty and meaning in what remains.