HEADS up, here comes Tony Bevan. Stand back, and admire his focus on the human frame.

From Monday until June 26, Abbot Hall Art Gallery will be up to its artistic neck and beyond with the much lauded figurative paintings and charcoals of London-based Tony, bringing together for the first time the full range of his figure paintings, through progressive stages of distortion and abstraction - the earliest 1980s stretched and twisted self-portraits - to his more architectural scaffold of angular lines.

Heads feature extensively - mainly his. There's nothing below the belt about Tony. Regarded as one of Britain's most important living artists, his Horizon was a real hit during the Kendal art gallery's recent multi-artist Enduring Image exhibition.

Particularly popular with visiting schoolchildren, including my own ten-year-old daughter who, on the home front, gave me chapter and verse on the finer points of Tony's red period' rolling head and noses.

Isn't it wonderful how children possess a clarity of mind and an imagination uncluttered by the baggage adulthood brings?

Born in 1951, Tony's own childhood was spent on a smallholding on the outskirts of industrial Bradford. The son of a milkman, his grandmother provided early inspiration, a figurative painter who copied the likes of Turner.

He began his training at Bradford School of Art before moving to London in 1971. Here he spent five years at Goldsmith's College followed by two years at the Slade School of Art.

From the very beginning of his career he has focused on the human body, and particularly his own head, painting it with an expressive power that reveals the isolation, emotion and inner psychology of the human condition in its widest sense.

Since his breakthrough' exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London, in 1987, he has rapidly gained recognition and critical acclaim for his distinctive portrayals of the human figure.

Large scale and even making his own paint, he appears to follow the traditional path of a figure painter, but his work is strikingly modern and expressive.

Abbot Hall is open Monday to Saturday 10.30am-5pm. Further details contact 01539-722464.

April 10, 2003 10:31