Biography

Julian Bell was born in 1952 and grew up in Newcastle and Leeds. His father was the potter and writer Quentin Bell, and his grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell. In the 1950s he stayed frequently at Charleston farmhouse on the Sussex downs, the home shared by his grandmother with the painter Duncan Grant. He read English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1970 to 1973 and subsequently attended the City and Guilds of London Art School.

From the mid 1970s Julian Bell has worked full time as a painter, engaging with an unusually wide variety of subjects linked frequently to his ongoing preocupation with perspective and the behaviour of crowds. Bell is the author of Bonnard (Phaidon, 1994), What is Painting? Representation and Modern Art (Thames and Hudson, 1999), 500 Self Portraits (Phaidon, 2000) and Mirror of the World - A new history of Art (Thames and Hudson, 2007). He has written on other painters’ work for the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, MODERN PAINTERS and THE GUARDIAN and poetry by him has appeared in the LONDON QUARTERLY. A volume of his poems, Three Odes was published by Dale House Press in 1997. For three years he was an associate editor on Macmillan Publishers’ Dictionary of Art.

Julian Bell has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1993, and in spring 1994 was a major contributor to the Gallery’s theme exhibition on the Piero della Francesca Trail. In 2000 he participated in The Art of Memory: contemporary painters in search of Marcel Proust, which received a second showing at the National Theatre in 2001. And in Lair of the Leopard Twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily. One-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1996, 1999 and 2002. In 1999 Arrest at Nevada Bob’s was purchased for the Permanent Collection of the Museum of London in 1999 with the support of the V&A / MGC Purchase Grant Fund and the National Art Collections Fund. Julian Bell is preparing now for his next one-person exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery Autumn 2008

Julian Bell

Ranging over an exceptionally extensive field of enquiry, Bell's paintings are characterised by their down-to-earth engagement with people in everyday situations viewed from surprising and illuminating perspectives. The unexpected viewpoint, sometimes that of a fly-on-a-wall, but more often embracing a searchingly panoramic or panoptic perspective ('like a fish trying to define the geography of its pond') is realised with masterly draughtsmanship allied to a dramatic sense of composition as the artist finds a solution to each new question he poses. In much of Bell's work there is a characteristic movement from a general idea towards the particular:

I spend a good deal of time fulfilling particular ways to express in paint the distinctive feel of things (whether clouds, foliage, faces…). There is a kind of tension between variegated textures and my other, quite simple swipe of broad brush running across the whole surface. …My ambition is for each picture to be as self-sufficient as possible. But the diversity for me is a kind of release - a way of touching on the open-ended richness of the world and the ways we see it.

A sense of history, coloured by a fusion of lyricism with a vein of anarchic humour prompted one critic to see in his work 'a collision between Brueghel and Chagall'.

Julian Bell's new book Mirror on the world: A New History of Art was published in October 2007 and is available from the Gallery or from the Publications section of the Gallery web site.

Clich HERE for more information.

Copyright © Francis Kyle Gallery. All Rights Reserved