Reviews

Harry Bell: paintings

After a visit to Newcastle a distinguished architectural critic once declared that, “It must be a very difficult to be an abstract painter here because the city and especially the quayside is so pictorial”. One knows what he meant. The spatial drama of the Tyne gorge with bridges sweeping across the river and skimming over the tops of buildings or the way in which stepped roofscapes split by stairwells and those narrow incisions through buildings known as chares, creating staccato rhythms of solids and voids, is almost irresistible.

Harry Bell, a native of Tyneside, perfectly vindicates the late Ian Nairn’s assertion: he loves the quayside area and he paints it with a matching passion. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that his motive is merely to record the picturesque. As well as the drama of space he also captures the poignant drama of time. It is there in the sombre blackness of the buildings, the rusticated late Victorian office blocks with their redundant notice boards advertising long gone sailings to Bremerhaven or the faded lettering on the empty Western Union office. It is there in the grimy windows and the grubby brickwork, a history which recent attempts at trendification fail to obliterate.

Harry Bell tells us all this in paintings which nearly always start from radical aerial viewpoints or suddenly cut-off compositions. He favours subdued tonalities, dark oppositions of warm and cold colours which somehow seem to personify that permanently shadowed area. His registration of this unmistakeably urban light has echoes of both Sickert and Edward Hopper but Bell is, of course, his own man. Neither of his illustrious forebears were so obviously driven by a sense of ‘genius loci’ as he so patently, and passionately, is.

William Varley (Art Critic) 1995

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We are lapping up the paintings of Harry Bell. He makes cityscapes which remind us of our favourite stuff by US artist Wayne Thiebaud who renders roads, buildings and other general what-have-you that makes up city life, but in such a way as to to make them seem beautiful. It's all down to colour and the application of it.

THE CRACK (October 2009)

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Bell's work is striking and could be recommended for fans of David Hockney, as he works in bright block colours with attractive compositions.

THE COURIER (9 Nov 2009)