The painter and writer Julian Bell is heading up a New Year’s show in Oxford of some 60 recent works by six British figurative artists exploring the interfaces between image-making and language. Opening January 20, it brings multi-generational perspectives and experiences to the contemporary practice of figurative and narrative art. Story Painters, Picture Writers, at St John’s College’s Kendrew Barn Gallery, borrows its title from an 1894 essay by Aubrey Beardsley dissing the narrative conventions of 19th-century academic art – a tongue-in-cheek appropriation given the storytelling thread that ties the show together.
The artists are an eclectic group. Bell, 74, grandson of Bloomsbury’s Vanessa and Clive, is an established art critic, historian and teacher at the Royal Drawing School. Gala Hills, five decades younger, is fresh out of Ruskin and the Slade.
Julian Bell, Crumpled Poem 2025
Bell, who read English Literature at Oxford before turning to art, contributes paintings rooted in the Chaurapanchasika, ‘The Thief’s Fifty Verses’, a thousand-year-old Sanskrit poem of stolen love. In flashes and fragments, the imprisoned poet tries to recall the illicit nights he spent with his princess, as he awaits execution following the discovery of their affair. “Various writers have tried to grapple with it from Sanskrit,” Bell says: “Their efforts tantalise, and what I have been painting is that incompletion.”
What all six have in common is “an interest in telling stories, showing human narrative”, says Kate Montgomery, curator of the show: “although in some people’s work that narrative is quite cloaked.”
For some in the group, the narrative is more cloaked than for others.
Nick Bush, a Sussex landscape painter, says his works “don’t tell overt, word-driven stories but approach language or narrative without slipping into illustration”. His practice is rooted in direct observation, often working outdoors on small panels to capture immediate impressions of light, weather, and mood. These plein-air works inform larger studio pieces incorporating imagined or memory-inflected reconstructions, compositions both grounded in a specific time and place and resonant with wider histories.
In contrast, Jane Griffiths, a poet, bookbinder, jewellery maker, and Oxford professor of late-middle and early-modern English, paints vanished houses as a direct metaphor for loss, often revisiting her childhood home in both poetry and painting, now demolished. Several of her paintings directly reference her poetry, revisiting a familiar subject in a different medium.
Nicholas Bush, The Good Shepherd 2025
Jamie McKendrick, like Griffiths, is a published poet and also a translator of Italian 20th-century literature (not least Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Contini). He illustrates his own writings with drawings in Chinese ink stick, Indian ink, and watercolour. In 2020, his poetry collection, The Years, won the Michael Marks Illustration Award. His paintings mix animal, botanical and geological motifs with invented landscapes and cityscapes.
Painting and poetry, he says, can share crucial elements: “In my own case, I used to keep poetry and painting quite separate, but I began to feel that the walls I built were impeding rather than helpful. I do think that poetry and painting can be close to each other. I think it’s a good time to re-invigorate the cross-pollination between the arts.”
In her own practice, Kate Montgomery, like Bell, a Royal Drawing School teacher, imagines landscapes and interiors of luminous clarity in the tradition of Persian miniatures, medieval hour books, the fairy paintings of Richard Dadd and the lustrous jungles of Douanier Rousseau. Her paintings are windows opening onto entranced worlds peopled by enchanted women and children. She says her paintings “look like stories but do not tell them.” Family narratives, themes of parenting, relationships, simple or complex, play out against a layered and intricately patterned background. Her chosen materials, deeply traditional, casein paint on birchwood panels, give her work its luminescent glow.
In Montgomery’s paintings, “there seems to be a still, secret narrative,” McKendrick says. “Something to do with childhood, things concealed, anxiety, sometimes a quite spooky notion of childhood. My point is there’s an implied narrative.”
If Montgomery’s paintings are spooky, they find themselves in good company with Gala Hills, whose main painting in the show, a 5-metre-long unstretched canvas titled “Storytelling”, draws inspiration from mythological texts, folk tales and outsider women. Among its weird cast of characters is Mary Toft, whose claim to have given birth to rabbits became an 18th-century cause célèbre. “She’s a figure that pops up in several paintings,” Hills says: “I really connect with her because I like anything that borders between human and animal. It really gets people going.”
Claudia Barbieri
Lead image: Gala Hills Storytelling Part 3
Story Painters, Picture Writers, Kendrew Barn Gallery, Oxford, 20 January – 2 February 2026.
Visit Here