Julian Bell – författare

A brand-new perspective on early modern art and its relationship with nature as reflected in this moving account of overlooked artistic genius Adam Elsheimer, by an outstanding writer and critic. Seventeenth-century Europe swirled with conjectures and debates over what was real and what constituted 'nature', currents that would soon gather force to form modern science. Natural Light deliberates on the era’s uncertainties, as distilled in the work of painter Adam Elsheimer – a short-lived, tragic German artist who has always been something of a cult secret. Elsheimer’s diminutive, intense and mysterious narrative compositions related figures to landscape in new ways, projecting unfamiliar visions of space at a time when Caravaggio was polarizing audiences with his radical altarpieces and circles of ‘natural philosophers’ – early modern scientists – were starting to turn to the new ‘world system’ of Galileo. Julian Bell transports us to the spirited Rome of the 1600s, where Elsheimer and other young Northern immigrants – notably his friend Peter Paul Rubens – swapped pictorial and poetic reference points. Focusing on some of Elsheimer's most haunting compositions, Bell drives at the anxieties that underlie them – a puzzling over existential questions that still have relevance today. Traditional themes for imagery are expressed with fresh urgency, most of all in Elsheimer's final painting, a vision of the night sky of unprecedented poetic power that was completed at a time of ferment in astronomy. Circulated through prints, Elsheimer’s pictorial inventions affected imaginations as disparate as Rembrandt, Lorrain and Poussin. They even reached artists in Mughal India, whose equally impassioned miniatures expand our sense of what 'nature' might be. As we home in on artworks of microscopic finesse, the whole of the 17th-century globe and its perplexities starts to open out around us.

‘Thames & Hudson’s new, affordable, covetable ‘Pocket Perspectives’: beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers’ Financial Times Respected painter and writer Julian Bell offers original insights into the art, practice and ongoing importance of painting. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, many felt sceptical or confused about painting’s on-going cultural relevance. In this context, Julian Bell’s What is Painting? provided an accessible and inspired account of artistic thinking and practice, and of the complexities then facing artists and their audiences. Eighteen years on, the situation is partly reversed. Painting has proved too resilient a practice to be marginalized any longer. Yet is there any sense of forward momentum for the art? Interrogating the factors that have changed our ideas of painting over the past two centuries, Bell addresses relations between figuration and abstraction and between narrative and non-narrative painting, as well as the waning of conceptual art’s dominance and the proliferation of experiments with the physical limits of painting. He also clarifies general concepts such as ‘expression’ and ‘representation’. Fully revised to provide a fresh look at the situation of painting, this new edition maintains the objective of lucid, historically informative explanation that earned the original edition its status as a text of lasting value. The book provides a general reader’s introduction to theories of painting that is not only reliable, but also stimulating and amusing to read.

A lavishly illustrated collection of essays on drawing as a vital intellectual, artistic and life practice, by the artists of the Royal Drawing School. Drawing is among the most profound ways of engaging with the world. It is absorbing, instinctive – a way not just of seeing, but of understanding what we see. Ways of Drawing brings together a range of reflections and creative propositions by contemporary artists and teachers associated with the Royal Drawing School, generously illustrated with images by alumni of the School and the work of significant artists past and present. From explorations of artistic development to short, imaginative strategies for seeing the world afresh, it repositions this art form as a vital force in the contemporary world. Advocating passionately for drawing as both deeply personal and utterly essential, this book is an invaluable companion for artists with all levels of experience looking for new inspirations for their practice.

This is the first book to survey the work of painter and printmaker Tom Hammick (b.1963). It sets Hammick's art within the context of contemporary debates about painting while relating it to the two-centuries-old Romantic tradition. Julian Bell explores in depth the artist's working processes, imagery and career to date, arguing that Hammick's work constitutes one of the richest imaginative achievements in late 20th- and early 21st-century British art. Many of Hammick's pictures respond to the landscape of South-East England, where he has spent much of his life. Others are inspired by his encounter with the wilderness of Canada's remote maritime provinces, a regularly revisited imaginative resource that has given his work much of its distinctive flavour. Hammick has spent three periods in Canada: as both a student and later visiting lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax between 1989 and 2002, and in 2005 after being awarded a residency at the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, now called the Rooms.Informed by the author's sustained contact with Hammick over many years, illustrated with over 120 carefully selected images, and produced in close collaboration with the artist, Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World will appeal to the artist's collectors and wide popular audience, as well as students, art-world professionals and painting enthusiasts. It is available also in a special edition incorporating the three-part colour etching Fallout, created by the artist specially for this publication in an edition of 60.