CURATED ARTS: Story Painters, Picture Writers

Story Painters, Picture Writers

A new show in Oxford highlights British figurative artists.

  Kate Montgomery Stilte/Silence 2025

The painter and writer Julian Bell is heading up an exciting New Year’s show in Oxford of recent work by a half-dozen British figurative artists exploring the interfaces between image-making and language.

Story Painters, Picture Writers, at St John’s College’s Kendrew Barn Gallery, borrows its title from Aubrey Beardsley’s 1894 polemic against the narrative convetions of 19th century academic art – a tongue-in-cheek appropriation given the story-telling thread that ties the show together.

Opening January 20, it brings multi-generational perspectives and experiences to the contemporary practice of figurative and narrative art. Bell, 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 the Slade. Jane Griffiths is a poet , bookbinder, jewellery maker and professor of late-middle and early-modern English at Wadham College, Oxford. Jamie McKendrick, also a widely published Faber & Faber  poet, is a translator of Italian 20th century literature, not least Giorgio Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Contini.

Kate Montgomery, like Bell a Royal Drawing School teacher, paints fairy tales in the style of mediaeval and Persian miniatures and has curated this artist led show.

      Nicholas Bush The Good Shepherd 2025

Nick Bush, a 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, creating a composition that is both grounded in a specific location and resonant with wider narratives.

    Jamie McKendrick Vesuvius Dormiens  2025

McKendrick 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 land- and city-scapes. Painting and poetry, he says, can share crucial elements of scale, rhythm, detail, texture, tone, and line leading to line: “The one thing left out of this list of correspondences is colour, a fundamental of painting that poetry can only envy.”

Jane Griffiths Promiscuous Grace 2025  

Griffith paints vanished houses as a metaphor for loss, often revisiting in both poetry and painting her childhood home, now demolished. Works in this exhibition explore houses in landscapes fleetingly glimpsed. Several of the paintings directly reference her poetry, revisiting a familiar subject in a different medium.

Gala Hills Storytelling part 3 2025

Hill’s current work draws inspiration from mythological texts, folk music and outsider female figures from throughout history. In a kind of automatic drawing process, she paints human animal hybrids evoking the ancient Welsh Mabinogion, tales of owl women and talking fish, remembering mythologies learned in childhood.

@katemontgomerypainter

Montgomery says her paintings “look like stories but do not tell them” . Family narratives, themes of parenting, relationships simple or complex, play out against a background of layered and patterned landscapes and interiors, calling to mind Persian and Mogul miniatures, French and Flemish Books of Hours and European Symbolist painting. Her chosen materials too are deeply traditional, casein paint on birchwood panels, giving her work a luminescent glow.

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 poem of stolen love, written in Sanskrit. In flashes and fragments, the imprisoned poet tries to recall the illicit nights he spent with his princess, as he awaits execution following discovery of their affair. “Various writers have tried to grapple it from Sanskrit ,” Bell says: “Their efforts tantalize, and what I have been painting is that incompletion.”

Story Painters, Picture Writers, Kendrew Barn Gallery, Oxford, January 20 - February 2.

CATALOGUE & ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES