Bartholomew Beal 1989 - 2019

We are incredibly fortunate to have worked with this enormous talent of figurative painting and moreover an extraordinary human being.

2012-2013 Jonathan Vickers Residency, Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site
2009-2012 BA Fine Art Painting, Wimbledon College of Art
2007-2008 Foundation in Art and Design, University of Gloucestershire            

Bartholomew graduated from Wimbledon School of Art in 2012 with a First-Class Honours degree. This was followed the same year by the Jonathan Vickers Residency in Derby, culminating in a solo exhibition at Derby Museum.

In 2013 he was taken on by The Fine Art Society Contemporary in New Bond Street, becoming the youngest artist in their history to have a solo exhibition, having now had three there - in 2014, in 2016 and in 2017. He was a finalist in The Threadneedle Prize and the Royal Society of Oil Painters Prize in 2018 at the Mall Galleries, and The Signature Prize in 2015. He won the Landmark plc Fine Art Award in 2012. He was shortlisted by BEERS Gallery for their Contemporary Vision Prize.

Bartholomew showed with the Violet Hour twice, in our first ever group show, Memory & Desire in April 2013, where he sold out, and later in the leafy environs of The Garden Museum for The Roots That Clutch in October 2018, where he found inspiration for his paintings in the sketches and studies he made there.

Coming from a literary background, his work was inspired by literature - Beckett, T.S.Eliot. “King Lear” and Seamus Heaney - but was never illustrative, using those writers and texts to develop his own visuals. He was a figurative, representational painter, in oils, placing figures in rarely comforting backgrounds, isolating them in fields of vivid colour and yet there is nothing bleak about his work: if it feels at times discomforting it is never cruel and there is a generosity of technique and palette that makes even his largest works accessible.

Bartholomew’s work embodies a conflict between the considered specifics of poetry and the unpredictability of paint. There is a point when the paint takes over, and each subsequent addition or subtraction lies as evidence of a poetic narrative.  A lone figure embodies an unfinished story against a background that is absent. What keeps arising is that solitary being, not a plain character, but more an illustration of mood.