ARTIST STATEMENT

“For the truths that the intelligence grasps directly and openly in the full-lighted world are somehow less profound, less indispensable than those which life has communicated to us without our knowledge through the form of impressions, material because they have come to us through our senses, but the inner meaning of which we can discern.”

~ Proust

The work in this show was done during a time of transitions. From my first stay on Monhegan in 2019, to the Covid years, to moving house last year on the basis of an intuitive prompting that couldn’t be quieted, I have become increasingly aware of the strength and tenacity of the forces that shape our lives behind scenes in which we believe we are the active agents.

Much of the work here documents three stays on Monhegan. The stillness and the quality of light made such deep impressions on me the first time, in particular, that I have continued to work from some of those initial images. Manana, twilight, done from a small watercolor and a slightly larger oil study, is one of them.

Other pieces - Settlement; Cloudburst; April; Equinox moon - are extrapolations of impressions that were felt as much as seen. Still others are scenes from everyday life that have become interiorized: Pines near the river; Wheeling, cloud cover; Winter window; Bowman Island.

Vernal pool was the first painting to be done in the new home and studio, where high water in early spring created an endlessly mysterious play of moonlight in trapped pools of water on the banks of the river below. As I worked on it, the demands of the past few years’ transitions fell into perspective as necessary changes in the service of the genius loci, the very particular spirit of place that neither explains nor justifies itself.

- Dozier Bell, 2024

BIO

Dozier Bell, a seventh-generation Maine native, studied art with Neil Welliver in the University of Pennsylvania MFA program and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Since her first solo show in 1987, she has appeared in over thirty solo and two-person exhibits in New York City and across the country. She is the recipient of several awards, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, two Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grants, and the Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. She received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Maine College of Art in 1997. Her work is included in a number of museum and corporate collections.

She is currently represented in Maine by Sarah Bouchard Gallery and by Carol Corey Fine Art in Kent, CT.

PRESS

Smaller shows at a trio of Maine galleries help usher in autumn
By Jorge Arango
September 1st, 2024
Portland Press Herald

“Bell is after a lot more than just photographic verisimilitude. She is an artist acutely interested in the dying of the light, and the many effects created in that liminal hour between day and night, when details become difficult to discern and contours blur and dissolve into darkness and shadow. The dexterity with which she portrays the physical qualities of the gloaming are breathtaking. Yet the reason they pack such a visceral punch is because what she gets right, beyond these objective elements, is the actual emotional affect of this hour.

The sense of a cycle ending, along with its attendant melancholy, is here. The wooziness we experience as we try to continue focusing on particulars even as we are defeated by the tenebrous light is here. The sense of the sky’s weight above us, the fuzzy glow of a moon behind mist, the silence that falls as birds cease their chirping and cooing, the awakening of night peepers and crickets … it’s all here. Just look at “Vernal Pool,” an acrylic on linen, and try to dispel any of the sensations mentioned above.”

- Jorge Arango, 2024

DOZIER BELL. Vernal pool. 40” x 32”. Acrylic on linen. 2024.
PHOTO CREDIT: David Clough