While the gallery continues to remain closed due to the NY Pause Act, we are pleased to announce the second of our weekly online exhibitions. We hope these presentations will help us to stay connected with our clients and the arts community as a whole.
Our second presentation is INNER PEACE. While we are living in isolation, it is important to find our own inner peace — a place where we can find solace, strength and renewal. For many, the natural world provides this kind of escape, but many of us do not have access to the outdoors right now. The intimate landscapes of Dozier Bell are at once deep evocations of natural environments culled from memory and experience past, and reflections of a life of philosophical inquiry and keen observation that merge in her work as marvels of virtuosity and poignant imagery.
Many of you are aware that we lost our friend and colleague Renato Danese last week. For Renato, being near the water quieted his thoughts. Whether fly fishing on the Restigouche River in Canada or walking by the sea near his home in Rhode Island, the shore was his place of calm. Bell’s tiny, intimate landscapes resonated powerfully for him.
Bell’s work brings to mind 19th-century American painters Albert Pinkham Ryder, R. A. Blakelock, Frederick Church, as well as England’s John Constable. Exacting and deliberate, often mysterious impressions of nature's disquieting, transitory presence, her drawings "comprise a vision of nature that sweeps across vast plains and valleys, ascends into lofty skies, and reaches toward far distant horizons,… The vision often pictures nature at dawn or dusk, its light generally dimmed and pale or momentarily darkened by clouds, its expanse sometimes broken only by a first or last glimpse of the flashing sun, its temper otherwise solemn, even troubled, as if brooding." (Belz, Carl. “Dozier Bell’s Drawings,” Left Bank Art Blog, February 20, 2014.) As Bell has remarked “Infinitely complex, at once undefended and harsh, welcoming and seemingly impenetrable, this forested, watery place continually shows me the inescapable vulnerability and unknowable forces that inform it, and by extension, us."
Dozier Bell was born in Maine. She graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in 1981 and received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. In addition to her Fulbright Fellowship, Bell has received Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants in 2003 and 1993, a grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in 2009, residencies at both the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, and in 2014, a Purchase Prize award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. She lives and works in Waldoboro, ME.
For further information please contact the gallery at contact@danese.com. @DaneseCorey
