I am drawn to historical images, often overlaid, as in memory, or recollection of experiences.  Buildings and man-made objects in the landscape are recurring themes.  My background in engineering combines with my love of history and nature to create paintings with interest, atmosphere and tension.  Issues such as globalization, pollution - and our seeming unwillingness to address them - can be utilised to create brooding images with warning overtones. 

I frequently use “other” materials in my work, introducing differing degrees of modeling, relief and effects.  MDF, steel, glass, wire, rubber, plaster, sand and tile cement are used in various combinations with a variety of types of paint medium. 

 Time and place and a sense of belonging to, and being part of, Britain’s history, play a crucial role in arriving at my themes and motifs.  I have passed through phases of still life, colour-field, and abstract figurative painting and have looked at the work and researched the psyche and motivation of Kiefer, Bomberg, Auerbach and Richter.  John Virtue’s London Paintings, seen at the National Gallery, influenced me to make paintings vehicles that demonstrate the physical nature of paint as well as the message held within the text.  

I am currently developing a thematic body of work based on the landscape, however,

I have moved away from naturalistic and representational rendering of the subject                 to create images with ambiguity, uncertainty and tension.  In order to devise visual ideas that contain a random element, my starting point is to describe the essence of the proposed image in a few succinct words.  The next step is to produce a sketchbook drawing of these words in the form of a code, the Morse Code.  Colours are applied which evoke the key to the image described and the completed piece is digitally photographed.  Using image manipulation and applying several filters, adjusting colour, contrast and sharpness, an abstracted image is created.  The result is used as a starting point to produce studies in oils as a precursor to the production of selected final outcomes. 

 The resulting piece becomes a painting derived from language, or literal prose, coded, then further modified by computer technology, finally to be rendered in traditional, or mixed media. The now ambiguous  outcome has thus become a metaphor for the described scene.

contact Les at

lesbell_priory@hotmail.co.uk