JULIAN BAILEY

An alumnus of the Ruskin School (1982-5), Julian Bailey’s art has formed amidst the vibrant geraniums and seascape of Dorset. We briefly caught up with him at the opening of his latest exhibition at Browse and Darby, a gallery just off St James’s in London, and were reminded that late in 2023 he held a joint exhibition with his daughter Gabriella Bailey (New College, 2018) at the Pembroke College JCR Art Fund Gallery. Entitled ‘A World Away’, this highlighted the connections both hold dear, spanning what we might broadly term Thomas Hardy’s Wessex – that broad swathe of landscape fanning out south and west of Oxford towards Berkshire and Wiltshire.

The tilt towards Hardy was captured in that exhibition, that focused partly on Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the novel Hardy originally published in 1891. Fragments are carried over to the present exhibition that can be seen until March 7, including the magnificent portrait, Tess (Inset detail shown in the leading image for this piece).

In an introduction to Bailey’s current exhibition catalogue, the curator and writer Vivienne Light FRSA notes immediately the happiness and vibrancy of the assembled paintings.

Visiting Julian in his studio, she wrote that ‘Inside the wood-burner was hard at work and the paintings on the walls defied the winter gloom, many of them redolent of sun filled days: blue skies, boats and beaches, and colourful figures.'

To further push this matter, we would go so far as to say that Julian’s work is the antidote to the Anselm Kiefer show now live at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, whose defining palate is black, plus strenuous German angst. It’s not that this is illegitimate, any more than Hardy’s world view, which often featured untimely rain storms. But isn’t it fabulous to be transported into Julian’s world.

Again we defer to Vivienne.

‘…his land- and sea-scapes emerge from real places, from Dorset’s chalk cost and its hinterland. The flowers and plants are those grown in his garden. Almost always his paintings come from something observed: it may only be a fleeting moment, action or expression on the part of a person or the effects of light or shadow moving across Dorset’s whale-like hinterland. What emerges are ‘real-time paintings’: a blend of realities seen, imagined, real and felt which will be subsequently subject to constant revision on the canvas.’

To our mind it is the colour that speaks first and last, in gorgeously rich impasto layers and fields. This is figuration not abstraction, yet the result is still transformed into the imaginative tilt of the artists’ imagination to form ‘pure compositions of light and space.’

Beyond, indeed before, the art speaks for itself. Art brings joy and the world needs it.