The work of Julian Perry described by Andrew Lambirth, Grayson Perry, Mark Lawson and William Feaver.

Julian Perry (born 1960) paints images of genuine topicality in an immaculate high-definition realist style. His show in 2007 dealt with the allotment sheds bulldozed by the relentless encroachment of the Olympic site. Since then he has been painting pictures of coastal erosion, visiting locations around England and composing hallucinatory images of deracination and loss.

Andrew Lambirth - The Spectator

Perry has a feel for in-between zones, for places where boundaries waver and enclaves are created. At a time of set aside he celebrates land use proper. He has painted allotments: patchworks of townie peasant practice, where (as David Jones could have observed ) the tiled plot is a direct quote from the Domesday Book. In his series of Viewing Point paintings he examined the Lee Valley Park, it's saplings and water features, and brought out (most notably of all in Coppicing for Nightingales the tenuous but unavoidable , parallels to be drawn with the Zig-Zaging duckboards of the Western Front in the paintings by  Paul Nash, whose images of martyred trees and suppurating shell holes recur, modified only by sixty years of silting and tree growth, in Perry's painting of a round pond set in a glade of newish trees.

V-2 Rocket Crater Pond in Snow II is a painting of a war wound become an amenity, the great hole frozen over, and long blue shadows in show the colour of silence. In painting such as this there are , of course, Caspar David Friedrich connotations, note just the snow and the northernness, but the whole notion of saying it with trees, the call of the wild as it were.

William Feaver.  London Guildhall. "Testament" Catalogue.

Perry is a painter of modern man's often uneasy relationship with the natural landscape. Recent shows have featured paintings of the Lea Valley nature reserves with titles such as 'Owl Boxes with Light Pollution and Moonlight'. Or 'Coppicing for Nightingales'. His 2004 show at the London Guildhall Art Gallery was of Works about what I always think of as London's threadbare back garden. Epping Forest . It included depictions of a pond created by a V2 Rocket and trees with plastic hubcaps caught in their branches His seemingly traditional painting are always meticulously researched and often loaded with art historical references. Flooded Orchid Path II (above) showing a wooden walkway zigzaging through a stand of leafless birches is reminiscent of Paul Nash's Second World War painting "The Mule Track".

 Grayson Perry (No Relation)      The Times 2007

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