New paintings by Julian Bell

Star Brewery Gallery

Star Brewery
Castle Ditch Lane
Lewes BN7 1YJ

open daily 10am - 5pm, closed Monday

‘Here is my lockdown. It happened that a few months before March 2020, I'd completed a suite of imaginative scenes of London life - busy, populous, dynamic, anxious. I wanted to switch mode. I took my radial easel, I stood it before a tree, I tried to observe the way the tree stood. New stuff emerged: trees, it turns out, are as complex as us. And then we, the humans, were all blown to the margins by the March wind that swept our way, and what else was there to paint but what still stood?

So since, I have been walking out in all seasons, placing that easel and canvas before given features of the watermeadows that surround my studio. These pictures may be based on the landscapes just south of Lewes, but they feel more like portraits. This barn, that ditch; this crop, that frail sapling. More yet like emblems: for what stands and what lies, what stays and what flows. But most of all, plain. What you see is what there is.’

Julian Bell 2021

about Julian Bell