Genesis
A sequence of thirty seven paintings based on the first book of the Bible
The paintings have been brought together in a finely bound volume, available for sale further down this page. A print Jacob Wrestling is also available on this page
Genesis; The Book of Beginnings
Published by St Anne’s Gallery 2015
From a review by David Carrier in artcritical, February 2016:-
Who, thinking of God’s creation of Adam, cannot almost involuntarily recollect Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image. How wonderful, then, that Bell creates a wholly original image, setting the naked, standing first man within a field of yellow containing the shapes of the animals and birds Adam is naming. And when we get to the Garden of Eden, another so much represented scene, how imaginative of Bell to show the serpent in the foreground, egging on Eve as Adam sleeps in the background. The scene of Noah’s ark is perhaps less familiar. (I recall a very fine, though much decayed Uccello fresco, depicting the flood, in Florence.)
It depicts Noah in the foreground, carrying a stout plank to the construction-in-progress. Bell, it may seem, is a figurative artist with a rather traditional style. And yet, how imaginative, indeed how boldly original are his pictures, and how varied! A singularly dark picture shows Abraham with his knife raised over Isaac. And when he gets to the scene of Isaac blessing Jacob, he creates a fluttering field of light-and-darkness, a marvelous way of illustrating the frailty of Isaac’s eyesight. Bell’s subjects may be very traditional, but his figurative style is, so I believe, very much a product of late modernism. See his backgrounds, which sometimes derive from 1960s abstraction, and the ways that sometimes he flattens the images of his actors; and, as I have noted, in the dramatic way he foregrounds some of his human figures, not unlike Philip Pearlstein, with the frame cutting across their limbs.
