James Bland

born 1979

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I'm an artist who paints, writes, and teaches. I grew up in Grimsby and the Scottish Highlands, the youngest child of a working-class family.

Early interests were art, nature, and computer coding. My first publication was a video game 'type-in' published in Amstrad Action in 1993. My earliest pocket money job was painting portraits, advertising in the back pages of the Grimsby Evening Telegraph.​​​

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Scoliosis​ in childhood led to spinal surgery at 13, my upper back fused and pinned to long titanium rods and a near-complete recovery. I left school (a state grammar) without A-Levels, and took an art foundation course at Grimsby College.​​ From 1999 I studied art at Canterbury Christchurch University, receiving a first-class BA, followed by a masters degree. Here, I studied with Irish artist John Long, and spent the summers as a tour guide on the river Stour. Between 2006 and 2007 I lived in Padua, Italy, where I taught English to children and bank managers.

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Since 2007 I have lived and worked in Canterbury, teaching part-time and exhibiting regularly in a number of independent art galleries in the UK and internationally.​​ In 2014 I was elected a member of the New English Art Club. in 2023 I stood for the presidency on a platform to attract new audiences and widen participation, winning 45% of the vote.

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2017 saw my work featured in Honoring the Legacy of David Park at Santa Clara University, California, alongside David Park and other Bay Area painters.​ In 2018 I was also invited to join the Contemporary British Portrait Painters group.

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Between 2018 and 2019 I was part of Disrupted Realism, an international survey of contemporary realism by US curator John Seed that led to exhibitions and a successful series of art books. In 2026, my work featured alongside that of 20th-Century greats Euan Uglow and William Coldstream in Looking for Appearance, a group exhibition curated by Mark Dunford and Tim Craven at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery.

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My first book, Portrait Painting: Abstraction, Storytelling and Mood was published by Crowood Press in June 2026.

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