artist statement

I had a lot of trouble defending my artist statement in my critique last night. This is it, and I thought I was pretty exact in it, but apparently not. If you watn to let me know what you think, I'd be delighted.



I began making these paintings because I wanted to try to build a living presence out of evident paint. I chose birds as my subject matter because their often bright, ethereal coloring and seemingly collaged, feathered bodies make them feel impossibly alive. This presentness was what appealed to me the most. I wanted to make images that contained feelings close to those I have when I think about the phrase “swansong”. While life inside the painting may be tragic and insecure in its randomness, that life exists exuberantly in the present through punctuations of genuine emotion, as humble and as fallible as the point of origin may be. This humility is also what leads me to use “evident” paint. For me, this means being transparent about the physicality of what I am doing and the unremarkable circumstances out of which I am trying to make something remarkable.

The ups and downs of the painting process determine most of what the image will look like. While I may have rough ideas as to where I want a picture to go, either from a conglomeration of photographic sources and drawings or from a composition of my own conception, more often than not I try to facilitate the occurrence of those accidental marks that seem the most alive. I have accordingly found myself editing objects into being more often than I have found myself deliberately rendering them.

I have always been attracted to paint by both its physicality and its natural propensity to create illusion. What has kept me continually engaged in the process is trying to navigate the necessary contradiction between these two characteristics when neither one dominates in an individual image. These types of paintings hold my attention the longest, and they are the ones that I aspire to make.

The artworks of John James Audubon, Katy Moran, Elizabeth Neel, Andrei Platonov, and David Berman are some of my current inspirations for this project. Natural observation has also proven an essential tool. Notation (photographed or sketched) of tree bark, branches, and leaves that I encounter in my daily walks through the neighborhood helped me to flesh out the somewhat “awkward” compositions which Initially attracted me to many of Audubon’s watercolors. Most importantly, my paintings rely on the incomplete but tangible structures of birds and creatures that I bring into my studio from past experiences. Using primarily my memories of a bird in flight over a photograph or a drawing allows for me to focus on making a living painting rather than one that just acts as a depiction.



John Bell