Julian Bell: Genesis

St Anne’s Galleries, High Street, Lewes, Saturday, June 20, to Sunday, July 5

WHEN fire ripped through Lewes’s Phoenix Theatre and Studio in March 2014, artist Julian Bell lost not only his workspace, but also decades of unsold paintings and sketches - including the plans for his latest project.

Genesis takes its inspiration from the first book in the Bible, which the grandson of Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell was inspired to read more than 18 months ago.

“Images came into my mind’s eye quickly and I started drawing them,” he says. “I had filled a sketchbook before my studio burnt down in March last year.

“After that event giving those remembered images a fresh and firmer reality in paint seemed the most worthwhile thing to be doing. The destroyed sketchbook had 25 sheets, but many of those ideas have completely altered or at any rate deepened.”

The exhibition at St Anne’s Galleries stretches from the Creation story and Adam And Eve, to the battles between fractious brothers Jacob and Esau.

“I leave off when the story turns to Jacob’s son Joseph,” says Bell, adding three dozen episodes was more than enough to paint. “The book of Genesis carries on for another 17 chapters.

“Genesis consists largely of stories that have been passed through many, many generations before being written down. I think of the book as being like Britain’s border ballads. They’re stories that are steeped in a great weight of human experience. They’re about what there was in the world back in the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, and about what there very largely still is – the relationships that humans have with each other and the relationship they have with God and the environment.”

The paintings, which are all oil on panel, are being collected in a limited edition book which Bell is putting together with his graphic designer daughter Sophy.

“The possibilities of this medium are something I am still only beginning to learn after some 40 years’ painting,” says Bell. “I ask oil paint to behave the way I want and oil paint asks me to behave the way that it wants – it’s a forever challenging fight.”

He sees the project as a way of coming over the disaster of losing so many years’ work.

“My own part in the process was to fix on this present project as a firm objective and to concert my activities around it,” he says.

“In a sense it is a fitting project, because Genesis embodies people’s experience of the hardness and terribleness of God, not simply the experience of his sweetness and mercy.”

Despite his family history Bell doesn’t see himself as a third generation Bloomsbury artist.

“I guess I inherit a Bloomsbury predisposition to think about art in terms of pleasure, but that’s about it,” he says. “Vanessa and Duncan [Grant, who shared Charleston with Vanessa Bell] were very much south-facing artists – all their reference points were French and Italian.

“I’m more northern and eastern – I look more towards the Netherlands, the Germans, the Persians, and the insular British tradition.”

Having grown up in Newcastle and Leeds - moving down to live in Lewes 21 years ago - he has happy memories of visiting his famous relations in the Sussex countryside.

“Virginia Woolf died long before I was born but her husband Leonard was still living in Rodmell when I was young – a man I much admired,” he says. “Vanessa died when I was eight – a very loving grandmother.

“Duncan was the last of that generation to survive. When I told him as a teenager that I wanted to paint he said: ‘In that case you will have to get up every morning and get down to the studio and stay working in it till the daylight ends, and that is basically how you will have to spend the rest of your life’. I wish I could say my own life were that simple.

“My immediate family would spend weeks during the summer holiday at Charleston when I was a child. The house was then a real backwater, tucked away deep in the country, cobwebby and musty with its garden overgrown – it was a fabulous place to make up your own adventure as a kid.”

Interview by Jessica Wood

Words Duncan Hall

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