When the City is Built

When the City is Built is a collection of scenes occurring during a single summer's day in contemporary London. Fictional characters pass through. An elderly foreigner arrives and seeks, disoriented, for his granddaughter. She meanwhile nannies the infant son of a North London architect. This architect's older son is a City intern. The story is as you wish: it has no text beyond this.

The exhibition reflects the artist Julian Bell’s love of the city and his curiosity in people. ‘I’m not always painting literal, specific pockets of London. Often I’ve reshuffled the evidence a bit to reach an essence of a certain London experience. Here and there I’ve added a skyscraper if a composition seemed to need it. After all, these are paintings and not a record,’ he says. ‘They're a set of thoughts about what the metropolis is like.' Drawing at various London locations was followed by imaginative re-thinking in his Sussex studio. There is an element of staging helped by models to achieve narratives and scenes.

‘Each painting leads me into different places and different thoughts. I start each day with buoyancy so I hope there is some tenderness in the paintings, some love, people helping each other. At the same time, there is some sadness, some desperation,’ Julian says. ‘There is a balance of trying to explore emotional as well as metropolitan experiences.’ Julian Bell was born in 1952 and descends from the Bloomsbury Group: his grandmother is Vanessa Bell, his grand-aunt Virginia Woolf and his father Quentin Bell. He is a highly-established painter and author. Julian teaches at the Royal Drawing School and is editor of Ways of Drawing, a set of artists' reflections on the practice, published this month by Thames & Hudson.

Julian gave a talk on the closing day of the exhibition. Read the notes in What Makes An Artist?
Read more about Julian Bell