In Detroit Paul married his first wife, Elaine, and in 1947 they moved to a flat in the Lower East Side of New York City. He continued his schooling under the GI Bill at the Brooklyn Museum, studying with Rufino Tamayo and John Ferren, and also took classes at the New School, studying with Adja Yunkers. He and Elaine became friends with other young like-minded people around the Baruch place neighborhood. As striving artists they often gathered to critique their art, and network about finding jobs and recognition for their work. He began to show his paintings, and received an award in an international art competition sponsored by the Philip Rosenthal-Brooklyn Museum Art School/Roko Gallery. Paul, along with Gene Powell, Harry Jackson, Bill Clerk, Al Newbill, Charles Nowles, Ann Wienholt and Bob Moir were a group of artists that became known as the Baruch group because so many of them lived in and around the neighborhood. In 1947 they all participated in a group show at the Carl Ashby Gallery, and in a show titled Lower East Side Artists at the Norlyst Gallery.

As part of this exciting and vibrant post-war art world, Paul immersed himself in the NY Abstract Expressionist art scene, and was exposed to the works of Hans Hoffmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. He exhibited at the Jacques Seligmann Galleries in 1949, and in 1950 he participated in an important group show: Fourteen Under Thirty-six: An Exhibition of Paintings at the Studio 35 Gallery. There he showed with Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Harry Jackson, Al Leslie, Robert Richenburg and others.

After several years Paul and Elaine divorced and he stayed in New York to pursue his artistic career. In 1952 he married his second wife, Dee and they found a cold-water flat in the Bowery of Greenwich Village and started a family. He worked odd jobs so he could continue to paint, draw and show his work. Paul’s New York art career culminated with a solo show at one of the highly reputed ’10th street galleries’, the Hansa Gallery, in 1954. 

Finally tiring of the pressures of the NY art scene, and having some friends in California, Paul and Dee moved to San Francisco with their two children. After earning his journeyman’s license Paul was soon supporting his young family as a carpenter. They rented an apartment at 2322 Fillmore Street (aka “Painterland”), which was later made famous by Bruce Conner’s documentary film, “The White Rose”. They quickly became immersed in the West Coast art scene.

Both Paul and Dee were musical; she played clarinet and piano and he played the alto saxophone. They enjoyed jamming with friends at each others’ homes, and sometimes Paul would play his sax in North Beach nightclubs. There is an anecdotal story of him loaning his sax to (a broke and horn-less) Charlie Parker during one nightclub playset. 

During the next two decades Paul continued drawing and painting, while exhibiting in San Francisco and Los Angeles and working on his Masters of Art at UC Berkeley. From 1974 through 1978 he taught landscape composition and watercolor painting at Santa Rosa Junior College. 

During the last few years of his life, Paul was working on what he considered to be a very special body of work – a series of 340 drawings of individual terraformed planets. This large graphite planet series manifests his lifelong interest in both realism and abstraction, and is a tribute to Paul’s outstanding artistic vision.

In 1947 he moved to New York, where he furthered his studies, continued to paint, and showed his work in local galleries. As part of this exciting and vibrant post-war art world, he immersed himself in the NY Abstract Expressionist art scene, and was influenced by the works of Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. His seven-year New York career culminated with a solo show at the Hansa Gallery.

Moving to San Francisco in 1954, Paul quickly became immersed in the West Coast art scene. Jay De Feo, Wally Hedrick, Hayward King, Hassel Smith, and James Weeks were among the artists he met early on. As part of this creative environment, he showed his works at The Six Gallery, East and West, Semina Gallery, New Mission, and the Batman Gallery.

In 1963 Paul moved from San Francisco to the redwoods of Sonoma County, and dedicated the next 25 years of his life to creating artwork. Painting and drawing prolifically, he experimented with acrylics, watercolors, spray paints and inks. He also spent countless hours researching astronomy and the cosmos, wrote a 63-page manuscript on the similarities between art and astrophysics, and created multi-media assemblages, rocket ships, ceramic creatures and asteroids.

From 1974 through 1978 Paul taught landscape composition and watercolor painting at Santa Rosa Junior College, while earning his Masters of Art at Berkeley. He exhibited his works often, both locally and throughout California. In 1975 he was invited to be part of the exhibition: Collage and Assemblage in Southern California at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Paul also had three shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era in 1976; a large solo show, Paul Beattie: Paintings and Drawings in 1980; and he was included in the museum’s The 50th Anniversary exhibition in 1984-85.

Paul’s decades-long interest in astronomy and the cosmos combined with his observations via his hand-built telescope directly influenced his drawing practice. He wrote:

His continued interest in space and the structure of planetary atmospheres is evidenced by his participation in the 1975 Otis Sky Show and by a one-man exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art titled The Earth’s Early Atmosphere in 1976. He also had a large one-man in 1980 show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled Paul Beattie: Paintings and Drawings.

During the last few years of his life, Paul was working on what he considered to be a very special body of work – a series of 340 large graphite drawings of individual terraformed planets. This series was specifically designed to be exhibited in an ordered progression up the Rotunda staircase of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. This large graphite planet series is a culminating tribute to Paul’s artistic vision.

Throughout his artistic career Paul made collages, most prolifically in the 1960s and the 1980s. Often employing printers’ inks and natural dyes such as blackberry juice to stain his materials, his early collages reflect the organic shapes of his Sonoma County surroundings, depicting cloud banks, rolling hills, and rising moons.

Paul’s sculptures and assemblages reflect his inclination to explore, and this experimentation resulted in a large variety of 3-dimensional pieces. As a progression from his collages he moved into using clay and other mediums to create sculptural works.

Inspired by his decades-long study of astronomy, Paul’s ceramic sculptures include realistic asteroids, starfields and small monolithic stellae. These works are inscribed with dots, dashes, and lines, manifesting his own textural language. In 1984 a number of his asteroids were showcased in a San Francisco Tiffany & Co store window.

Using clay, he also produced a series of wall-mounted creatures that elicit a sense of movement and play. Painted orange, they appear to be made of molten rock, pinched and pulled to create loosely-rendered gestural forms that seem to be kicking, fighting, and dancing.

Reflecting the exciting influence of the groundbreaking Hubble Space Telescope discoveries and following his interest in space exploration and the cosmos, Paul continued to explore the plastic arts using other materials. He fabricated three-dimensional assemblages for imagined intergalactic travel and communication, making spaceships, spaceports and rockets out of mediums such as star maps, glass, paper maché, wooden dowels, and spray paint.

Paul also created a series of assemblages that are more architectural in their visual impact. These wall-hanging pieces are high-relief, employing acrylic pipe, dowels, wooden blocks, and paint, and reflect his interest in abstraction.

In 1959, Paul was introduced by his friend Elias Romero to the medium of creating lightshows using immiscible liquids on overhead projectors. He soon participated in several multi-media performances, adding his own acetate drawings to the visual effects on the overhead projector.

His friends Warner Jepson and Bill Spencer accompanied these performances with improvisational music. Some of these ‘happenings’ involved dancing by Simone Morris [later Forte], Robert Morris, and other dancers from Anna Halprin’s studio. This experience inspired Paul to further explore the visual mediums of photography and film.

At this time Paul acquired a 16 mm Paillard Bolex movie camera and was soon pursuing filmmaking, an interest that lasted into the 1980s. One of his earliest black-and-white filming experiences was participating as the camera man for ruth weiss’ poem-film “The Brink” in 1959-60. His film, “A Thimble of Goodbye”, based on an Idell Romero (Aya Tarlow) poem, was premiered in 1961 at the innovative Batman Gallery in San Francisco.

Most of his films were shot in locations that included San Francisco, Larkspur, and the redwood forests of his home in Healdsburg. The artists Wallace Berman, George Herms, and Arthur Richer (and their family members) were featured in several of his early films. Scores for these films were composed and performed by musicians Bill Spencer and Dave Brown. Two of Paul’s early black-and-white films were shown at the Centre Pompidou Museum in Paris in 2016 as part of the exhibition ‘Beat Generation: New York  San Francisco  Paris’, representing the innovative filmmaking of that era.

In the late 1970s Paul acquired a 8 mm film camera. He made several color films, one called ‘Supernova’, which illustrates the concept of a billion years, and another titled ‘The Drawing’ which demonstrates how he depicted his understanding of the cosmos in his artwork. 

In 1963, he and fellow artist George Herms collaborated on 50 decks of poetry cards titled ‘Game for Angels’. Each deck of 32 cards came in a hand-sewn drawstring bag. Paul gifted decks of these poetry cards to friends including Wallace Berman, Jess, Dean Stockwell, ruth weiss, and Michael McClure.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris featured three M-C Press pieces in their 2016 exhibition titled ‘Beat Generation: New York San Francisco Paris’. Included were ‘Game for Angels’, ‘Hand print with Z’ and ‘Curve Book’, as well as two of Paul’s 1960s black-and-white films.