Laura Bell

Lives and works in Bronx, NY, USA

Artist statement

Nature is an indifferent witness to our history and our conflicts, reclaiming ground without malice. Chaotic landscapes are formed through our increasingly intense face-offs. Collisions can be explosive but these extremes also provoke beauty — in the fractured world, the ivy taking down a brick wall, the fantastical profusion and power of the wild world. I often work with collaged images as grounds: laser prints of photos, studio cast-offs, cutouts from calendars, catalogs, books. This creates a layered compositional space; I might bury the images, but I feel their call-and-response with the paint and the alchemy that happens there. The picture plane is often in flux and images might be a slow burn: goldfish flowing through a tumultuous sky over the wreckage of a boardwalk ("Goldfish Sky"); circular cutouts of the vistas of a Bronx cemetery arcing over a landscape reinventing itself (“A Different Equilibrium”); a pixelated flower radiating under a full moon in May ("Flower Moon"); a chaotic landscape shooting a chain of orbs skyward ("Orb Tumble"); fragments of spray-painted paper and cutouts from a tropical fish coloring book vibrating in an underwater landscape (“Dive Deeper”); shots of a solar eclipse taken from an urban balcony rising as glowing bubbles from a reedy blue forest ("Eclipse Forest"); a psychedelic storm looming over a rising sea as it engulfs a pink mountain ("Neon Squall"); vacation landscapes convulsing around impossible animal sightings ("On Vacation,...

Artwork