12 February to 11 April 2010

Julian Bell and Tom Walker are two longstanding friends both living in Sussex.

Both are full time professional artists with a dedicated sense of craftsmanship.

After decades of work, Tom Walker specializes in exploring the possibilities of soft pastels. He brings to them a feel for surrealism and European art as well as a very British humour and eccentricity.

'As each image that I make in this way gels or crystallises,' he says, 'it seems to me that it is like a glimpse through a window or a doorway, either looking into or out of a space, a room perhaps in a house with infinite rooms, each one different, containing unexpected, enigmatic, amusing or disturbing elements or experiences.'

Tom has become best known however for another aspect of his pastel work - his series Snooker In The Frame, a wildly inventive and often hilarious set of variations upon the snooker table. Tom is also exhibiting work from a new series, devoted to the art of the dance.

Julian Bell by contrast works in oils and from observation - his work is unmistakably in the realist tradition.

Many of the pictures he is exhibiting are fast, urgent studies from the life, whether they are landscapes or figures. Julian devises exceptionally wide-angled panoramas and invents complex, often irony-laden narratives.

As he explains it, 'Various untrue stories and a large imaginary bar seem to have marched in and taken over my studio lately. But for those who prefer plain fact, I'm still painting plenty of slices of everyday normality - roadworks, shopping malls and throngs of naked women.'

In the past few years Julian has taken his panoramic interests abroad, to places such as Iran, India and Russia, mainly for research for Mirror of the World, a 500-page global history of art published by Thames & Hudson in 2007 and critically acclaimed as 'irresistible' and 'tremendous'.

Julian's writing on art also appears in The Guardian, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

Julian Bell appears by courtesy of the Francis Kyle Gallery and St Anne's Galleries.

Image: Julian Bell, Outside Skotoprigonyevsk ©