'The strange ever-changing light, the endless streets and the shuddering feel of the sprawling city, lingers in my mind like a faintly glimmering memory of a long forgotten, perhaps never experienced childhood, which if rediscovered and illuminated would ameliorate the pain of the present… Although I have drawn and painted from landscapes and people constantly, I have never finished a picture without first experiencing a huge emptying of all factual and topographical knowledge. And always the moment before finishing, the painting disappears, sometimes into greyness forever, or sometimes into a huge heap on the floor to be reclaimed, redrawn and committed to an image which makes itself.' Leon Kossoff [1]

Leon Kossoff has lived in the same semi-detached house in Willesden Green since the late 1960s, in what is still a relatively quiet corner of North West London. The present painting shows the view from the artist's garden, looking down a path and out onto a section of railway line which runs between Kilburn and Willesden Green stations. Just as Kossoff's portraits have focused on a handful of sitters with whom he has close relationships - his parents, wife and a few models - Kossoff's landscapes have also been based on parts of London with which he is extremely familiar, and which he has been able to observe day after day, season after season. Here, his own garden suggests the possibility of describing both private and public space - a quiet patch of green, with the rush of the railway beyond. Kossoff has noted that even when he paints the crowds in an underground station somehow, 'the people I'm painting become the people I know' [2], his wife Rosalind (Peggy), his father or Fidelma emerging from within the crowds. In this way Kossoff blurs the distinction between private and public, past and present, as if his conception of home is something elastic and ever present, that travels with him wherever he goes.

Kossoff's working method is very similar to that of his younger friend Frank Auerbach (b.1931). Both studied under David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic and both have kept closely to Bomberg's advocation of close observation through drawing, in combination with a deep and intuitive response to the subject. Now aged 92, Kossoff has recently had to stop painting, but continues to make drawings. Before this, his working routine was always the same, he would go out to draw on a daily basis, the act of drawing awakening his senses and feeding into whatever he was painting in the studio that day. As he explained, 'Drawing is a springing to life in the presence of the friend in the studio, or in the sunlit summer streets of London… painting is a deepening of this process' [3]. In his studio [4] he would work in oils on board and, if by the end of the session, a painted image was not to his liking, he would scrape off the entire surface in order to start afresh the next day. Paintings might proceed in this manner for months, until finally, at some unknowable point, the image would come together in just 'a couple of hours'. He explained, 'The paint is mixed before starting - there is always more than one board around to start another version. The process goes on a long time, sometimes a year or two. Though other things are happening in my life which affect me, the image that I might leave appears moments after scraping, as a response to a slight change of movement or light.' [5]

Given the weight of paint which could accrue on the surface, Kossoff would often end up painting on the floor, as is evident here in the lashes of white paint which have inadvertently fallen onto the picture from above. Kossoff's final image has a real feeling of spontaneity, but, at the same time, the sculptural facts of the painting - its lumpen surface and the jagged edges where paint has been pushed out from the centre - carry the history of its making.

The present work is extremely close in palette and composition to the large version, with the same title, which was acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery, Washington in 1988 (Fig.1). It's clear that the larger painting is of considerable importance in Kossoff's oeuvre - it was the cover image of his exhibit for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995 (which toured to the Dusseldorf Kunstverein and the Stedelijk, Amsterdam) and it was also included in his Tate Gallery retrospective the following year. In the Tate catalogue Paul Moorhouse describes the subject of this painting: 'Glimpsed in the twilight, a diesel and a tube train pass one another. The lights have just been switched on, and small figures can be seen in the moving carriages. Set against a darkening sky, the scene is rendered in full greens, fading reds and rich ochres suggesting a moment of peace and tranquility.' [6]

In a related picture, Between Kilburn and Willesden Green, Winter Evening, 1992, painted five years later, Kossoff returns to the same subject, but now goes down to the bottom of the garden, to peer out along the track (Fig.2) [7]. Upon its acquisition for the National Galleries of Scotland, the then Keeper, Richard Calvocoressi wrote of this painting: 'It is a particularly fresh example of Kossoff's urban landscapes in which racing clouds, swaying trees, hurtling and tilting railway carriages, and a cold afternoon light showing up occasional patches of bright colour all combine to give an impression of rapid movement and change. Paradoxically, this image of transience is realised in the most solid and permanent of materials, lending it a tangible and enduring physical presence.' [8]

The subject of the railway, with its metaphorical allusions of departure and return, has provided inspiration for numerous modern British poets, writers and artists. In 1934, Barbara Hepworth described in the publication Unit One, the moment by moment transformation of the landscape while travelling by train: 'In an electric train moving south I see a blue aeroplane between a ploughed field and a green field, pylons in lovely juxtaposition with springy turf and trees of every stature. It is the relationship of these things that makes such loveliness…I want to project my feelings about it into sculpture - not words, not paint nor sound'.

Kossoff has painted railway lines, stations and intersections throughout his career. Train lines, he says, 'open out the landscape, somehow'. [9] A view of Willesden Junction, seen from above, is the subject of a spectacular early oil Willesden Junction, Early Morning, exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1963 (Fig.3). In this dramatic work, Kossoff's thickly applied oil is gouged and dragged in such a way that the entire momentum of the painted surface follows the railway lines to converge on the horizon at the centre of the picture. In the later painting Willesden Junction, Morning in October, 1971 (Fig.4), the view is the same but the bleak palette of greys and browns has given way to red, yellow and blue, with which Kossoff picks out the tracks and power lines.

Kossoff made many drawings of Dalston Junction in the early 1970s after taking a second studio overlooking the lines (Fig.5). These drawings, often in charcoal, are executed with great energy, as Iain Sinclair later observed, 'Railways play a large part on the story. Railways as ladders of memory and as metalled rivers sliced by the branches of a cherry tree at the bottom of a Willesden Green garden... The railway drawings are epics of inhibited spontaneity, monochrome Turner seizures of elemental forces choked back by the broken ribs of cancelled strokes, weighed down under a curtain of solid smoke.' [10]

In the present painting, the action does not converge on the horizon, but instead moves horizontally. The forward motion of the trains, which hurtle towards the centre of the picture from left and right,

is brought to life through Kossoff's rapid application of paint - the flicks, swirls and upward thrusts of the brush - and the accidental splashes of white and pale green. This sense of oppositional movement is also found in works such as Outside Kilburn Underground March, 1985, where commuters move inwards from the left and right hand sides of the picture, and, conversely, in Booking Hall, Kilburn Underground, 1987, painted in the same year as this work, where the figures press out towards the edges of the picture (Figs. 6 & 7).

Here Kossoff evokes the fading light in a largely naturalistic palette - ascending bands of green, turquoise, yellow, red and grey structure the composition, enhancing the sense of horizontal movement. The wider band of chalky green offsets the more agitated red of the brick houses on the opposite side of tracks, and throughout the picture colours are mixed with, or laid over, white, softening their impact and drawing the image together. Running against these horizontal stripes of colour, are patterns of short vertical lines which divide the houses and delineate the windows of the trains. These marks suggest a visual rhythm, which echoes the temporal rhythm of rattling trains coming and going. The garden path is described in an identical manner to the rails below, and it looks almost as if one of Kossoff's 'metal ladders' has broken free and is now making its way up the garden to the house. It is this path which forms the emotional centre of the picture, metaphorically connecting the artist to the glowing carriages rushing past behind.

Kossoff continued to focus on this subject from 1987 to 1994, after which his attention switched to paintings of Embankment station. In 1987, the year this work was painted, Kossoff also made his first painting of Christchurch, Spitalfields; nude studies of Fidelma, Pauline and Sally and portrait heads of John Lessore, Peggy and his brother Chaim. Kossoff later returned to the subject of his garden in an important cycle of paintings of his cherry tree, painted between 2002 and 2008. In these works, Kossoff pays close attention to falling light and seasonal changes in colour. Often we see the same bands of colour as in the present picture, Kossoff contrasting the organic form of the tree with a streak of blue from a passing train (Fig.8).

On the opening of London Landscapes at the Annely Juda gallery in 2013, Andrea Rose, curator of Kossoff's Venice Biennale exhibit, noted how Kossoff, 'comes from a period when painting was being examined after the post-war period and Kossof, Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, uniquely in Britain, belonged to a generation that believed in the great continuation of Western painting and tradition and its renewal and its survival'.[11] Looking back now at Kossoff's long career, we are left in little doubt as to his enduring commitment to the expressive possibilities of painting. Moorhouse observes that, 'At the heart of Kossoff's work, there is a sense of personal wonder in the presence of nature'. [12] But unlike Bomberg, Kossoff did not need to travel to the mountains of Spain for inspiration - he found many of his most important subjects within walking distance of his home. Through his poetic evocations of building sites, swimming pools, railways lines, city streets and his own back garden Kossoff shows us that beauty is right here where we are standing.

[1] Leon Kossoff, exh. cat, Hirschl & Adler Gallery, NY, 1983

[2] London Landscapes, promotional trailer, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnamQOijqgM

[3] London Landscapes, exh. cat, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 2013

[4] Kossoff's main studio has been a room in his house since c.1966, although he has also taken additional studios elsewhere

[5] The artist, quoted in Leon Kossoff from the Early Years, exhibition catalogue, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York 2009, p7

[6] Paul Moorhouse, Leon Kossoff, Tate Gallery exh. cat, 1996, p33

[7] There is a second version of this painting of an almost identical size

[8] Art Fund website: https://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/5429/between-kilburn-and-willesden-green-winter-evening

[9] The artist talking to Charlotte Higgins, 'Leon Kossoff's love affair with London', The Guardian, 27 April 2013

[10] Iain Sinclair, 'At Annely Juda', The London Review of Books, Volume 35, Number 11, 6 June 2013, p26

[11] Leon Kossoff, London Landscapes, promotional trailer, 2013

[12] Moorhouse, p25