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Artist Statement:
I admire the eccentric artists
of the 19th century, like
Albert Pinkham Ryder and
William Blake as well as many
who were untrained and painted
primitively. I’m drawn to the
way light was beautifully
expressed in paintings by
Romantics like Eugene
Delacroix and Goya.
Wordplay interests me and I
can see humor in life along
with the absurd. I can’t help
but include some of that in my
paintings. Since having a
stroke, I moved to Laguna
Honda Hospital and have been
telling friends this address
sounds like a car dealership
(which I hope would not be
held against me by Saab
specialists) . Like Simon on
the Monty Python BBC series,
“I like to draw pitchers”.
I’ve reread Jules Verne again,
more recently, “The Sphinx of
the Ice Fields: A Sequel to
Edgar Allan Poe's The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym” after which I made a
painting in 1977.
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Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
Arthur Bell OPEN STUDIOS at
Garage Gallery
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16 10am-2pm
Show extended and Gallery
Hours
Monday through Friday 10am-
5pm
655 Bryant St, @5th St, San
Francisco 94107
see
http://www.embarcaderoauto.com/
garagegallery.html
...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
1. Garage Gallery, San
Francisco, CA
2. Sanchez Art Center,
Pacifica, CA
3. Marin Artists' Society,
Ross, CA
4. Chow's Restaurant, Church
St. San Francisco, CA
5. Bazaar Cafe, California St.
San Francisco, CA
6. Annual Art with Elders San
Francisco, CA
7. Peninsula Art Museum,
Belmont, CA
8. ...
Further Information
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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from ARTILLERY (killer text on art) volume 4,issue 6 July/Aug 2010
ARTHUR BELL: Paintings 1970-2010
Garage Gallery
In James Ensor’s huge 1889 painting, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, at the Getty Museum, the earthly return of Jesus (who resembles the artist) goes unnoticed by the teeming Flemish carnival crowds. It’s a fitting metaphor for the sidelining of the eccentric visionary artist in the materialistic, industrial nineteenth century; artists like William Blake and Samuel Palmer in England and David Gilmour Blythe and William Rimmer in America worked unseen and unheard amid the hubbub and din (although Ensor and Albert Pinkham Ryder found audiences). Blake said, “I am laid by in a corner as if I did not exist.” Today’s pluralistic, post-industrial art world has unfortunately followed Victorian precedent in missing a talent just as anarchic and comical as its predecessors.
Arthur Bell is a San Francisco painter who exhibited in the 1970s and 80s, but rarely since then, his situation exacerbated by a series of strokes that left him temporarily unable to paint. The Garage Gallery’s retrospective of eighty paintings spanning forty years is, consequently, a treat for connoisseurs of the strange and marvelous, and genuinely imaginative (as opposed to the overwrought confections of bad pop surrealism). In Bell’s paintings, strange characters are involved in mysterious, amusing events; he blends pop culture references (Gershwin, Zappa, Costello), fantastic literature (Poe), and northern California lore without a trace of self-consciousness. In The Beachmasters of Año Nuevo (2003), alpha-male elephant seals heave themselves along the sand to woo females and chase off rival males; here, however, the beachmasters are blubbery middle-aged men. In The Coming of the Lord (1994-2004), a crowd gathers at Candlestick Park (transposed to the Altamont Pass) to await the Divinity while archangels shine head-mounted floodlights on a comical red devil. In The Fog Machine (1978), “the wicked guy who lives in the forest puts a magical substance into the machine that burns into fog,” according to the artist. In The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) (2003), named for a Grateful Dead song, “the ostrich is like the pantomime horse: you see two sets of legs. This is a haunted hotel on the Golden Road; it was an old road house that sold 7-Up. Along the wall sit a dead dried-up Mexican bandit and a mummy [while] Sweet Pea looks on [and] the curtains blow out the window in the heat.” In Petitioners of the Gods (1987), we see a pantheon of gods and their supplicants: “the chile rellenos god; the ancient Egyptian jackal-headed god, Anubis; the mummy god; the crocodile god with his footstool on wheels. I am sitting reading the cartoons in The New Yorker. There are Persian carpets below and a monkey waiter, a griffin, and an elephant, among others, here to petition.” In Round Coffin (1982), Shakespeare and Goya’s Duchess of Alba as a widow are looking at the coffin. It’s about birth and death: the sperm cells are dying; the Archbishop and Falstaff are there; the cart for the “Repossession of the Giant Orange” [a fast food stand from Bell’s Santa Cruz youth] is there; newspapermen from The National Enquirer are snooping around.” In Waterskiing Monkeys (1977), a “large shaved gorilla is riding two dolphins wearing swim goggles. Three smaller monkeys are water skiing. In the background, the King Cosmo Imperial Cheroot, a steam-operated kayak, is sinking.” Other paintings include feathered-hat-sporting llamas, narwhal-shaped paddlewheel steamboats, pterodactyl hunters, a canine Wyeth heroine, a harp-playing robot, a quadrapus (“half an octopus”), a dolphinette, and a handstanding pink elephant. In Arthur Bell’s hilarious, absurd, and sometimes mordant dream world, all this makes perfect sense; he is a bona fide original—an American Ensor.
—DeWitt Cheng
http://artbusiness.com/1open/firstth0510b.html
SAN FRANCISCO ART GALLERIES OPENINGS
FIRST THURSDAY - 05.06.10 Part II
Garage Gallery: Paintings by Arthur Bell - 1970-2010.
Review and images by DeWitt Cheng: Arthur Bell is a San Francisco painter who showed in the 70s and 80s, but has been exhibited rarely since then, except for a couple of times at Pacifica's Sanchez Art Center. The Garage Gallery (which shares space with Embarcadero Automotive, a Saab/foreign car repair shop) is showing around eighty paintings spanning the past forty years, in a comprehensive retrospective; thanks, curator Bram Goodwin! Bell's work is amazingly eccentric-- and genuinely imaginative, with strange characters involved in mysterious and amusing doings; he's a bona fide original. The artist's comments about the works make for some pretty good reading, revealing a quirky, oddball temperament nourished on fantastic literature and pop music. The show is a rare opportunity to see a remarkable body of work that somehow, inexplicably, has escaped art-world notice... so far, that is.
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Art Hazelwood 2006, San Francisco Art Magazine
Arthur Bell has a series of stunningly beautiful paintings, loose in execution, harmonious in coloring, that gives the viewer entry into a very personal world. His Coming of the Lord is a witty, original and comic piece. The archangel knitting while awaiting the arrival of the Lord is just one touch of this painting that does not go for any easy reading of eschatology. In fact, it speaks both in mocking satire and with a genuine sense of spiritual longing.
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