Charleston, Lewes
Bell’s strange and charming ceramics celebrate a life dedicated to creativity, while next door Sterling’s bawdier, weirder paintings form a critique of race and power
Quentin Bell was not a great artist, but that didn’t stop him. He saw the world as a magical place. The ceramicist (son of the Bloomsbury group’s Vanessa Bell; biographer of his aunt Virginia Woolf) spent his life lost in a world of magic, myth, newts in ponds, levitating women and knights on horseback. He died in 1996, leaving behind decades of pots, plates, figurines and drawings filled with wonder and amazement.
It all started when Bell was nine years old. Taken to a magic show by some relatives, he saw a jaw-dropping spectacle: a beautiful woman seeming to float in the air. It stayed with him throughout his life.
