James Bland

The New English Art Club member shares his thoughts on composing, colour and how to keep things interesting with STEVE PILL

We were settling down to the second half of the interview when it happened. James Bland had just given a guided tour of his recent exhibition at Gallery 286 – a contemporary art space in the front room and basement of a private, five-storey Kensington townhouse - and we had retired to the garden to talk some more over a pot of coffee and bask in the last of the late afternoon sunshine. He’d been a genial host up until that point, answering questions eloquently and often after long pauses as he gathered his thoughts over how best to explain techniques and processes that otherwise come instinctively to him. Then he popped the question.

“You don’t mind, do you?”

James had produced an A5 sketchbook and pencil from his bag and indicated he was about to make me his next sitter. In more than a decade of interviewing people for Artists & Illustrators, this is a first. “I get very nervous under scrutiny,” he explains. “I had a photographer come around recently [to take his portrait] and the only way I could get through it was to paint him. He was under scrutiny then and it sort of made us even.”

Put in this way, it only seems fair. Yet the transactional nature of James’s approach to the encounter and his obvious need for things to remain on an equal footing are also key to understanding his figurative work. He talks excitedly about “the surprises you get from working with another person” and “the collaboration” involved. “I think my paintings of people are often a bit more sympathetic,” he says. “I like it to be that you are not so much looking at people but looking with them, feeling sympathetically with what they’re posing or feeling.”