Art - Julian Le Bas

Before I talk to Julian Le Bas I wander round his exhibition of paintings and charcoal sketches in the HQ Gallery. He’s just putting the finishing touches to the hanging. There are some sketchbooks piled on a chair, and paintings which haven’t made the cut leaning against the wall. The paintings downstairs are oils on canvas, usually seascapes, whose massive power belies the relatively small frames they are confined in. It’s like a post-impressionist Tardis effect. Julian paints vivid scenes in thick strokes of multi-coloured oils, which capture mood more than anything; you can’t quite see where the sea ends and the sky begins.
I nose into the notebooks, which contain sketches for his paintings, as well as hundreds of life drawings. There are cows, too: recumbent cows, painted from behind. There are also notes he has written for himself, saying things like ‘Try to make space tangible - gather the clouds (God’s breath)’ and ‘the weight of the weather - sometimes a feather or a fathom.’
Upstairs, where I talk to Julian, there is another seascape, three Tuscan landscapes ú and some charcoal drawings of goats and sheep. “There doesn’t seem to be any sign of human life in your work,” I suggest, “but your sketch books are full of life drawings.” “I suppose my main interest is in the landscape, the vastness of the space it inhabits, and the specific atmosphere it creates,” he says. “The life drawings come from my art teaching workshops, drawn directly from the figure. The forms of the human body will re-appear in my landscapes, though not in a self-conscious way. They help me see the relationship of forms.”
Julian cites late Turner paintings and Constable’s seascape sketches as influences, as well as Emile Nolde’s morbidly romantic ‘The Sea B’, which used to hang in the old Tate.