ARTIST STATEMENT

When I began painting forty-five years ago, I was drawn to the restrained spirituality of northern European painters of the Reformation era - Memling, Holbein, van der Weyden - as it was expressed in the balance of light and dark, the real and the fantastic, and a religiosity that neither amplified nor questioned itself. The world of rural Maine in which I grew up could hardly have been more removed in time and culture, and yet as I began to paint the landscape, the ethos conveyed by those early painters found an echo in the mute sanctity of the natural world. 

I value the filtering function of memory. When I work from it (as I usually do), aspects of a scene that were incidental fall away, while some that were deeply sensed but not seen have an opportunity to manifest themselves in the painted image. “Participating consciousness,” said cultural historian Morris Berman, “involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene.” Holding the image of a place in memory, allowing it to gather to itself everything in my own consciousness with which it resonates, feels like a form of what Berman describes. It removes the illusion of separateness that is such a prominent feature of contemporary life.

Another concept that has long engaged me is expressed in the German term Heimsuchung, which has no precise equivalent in English. Its original meaning of visitation by God, of God knowing exactly where one is at every moment of one’s life, gradually gave way to its use as a term for the visitation of disasters such as plague, famine and war; and yet the term still encompasses these two extremes: everyday union with the divine, and the devastation and annihilation of the physical self and/or its environment. Between these two poles is implied an omniscient being, such as the God described by the Psalmist of the 139th Psalm: one who discerns our thoughts from afar, in whose book "were written all the days that were formed for us, when none of them as yet existed," and to whom "darkness is as light." 

My original impetus to paint remains essentially unchanged - to create, from the images in my own life, an armature for the numinous as I have experienced it.

DOZIER BELL
9 May 2022