“Imagination plays a large role in our acceptance of something as true or false, legitimate or not. In short, I mean to say that our day-to-day sense of the world is largely based on imagination and its role in conceptualizing what we come to accept as basic knowledge.” –Artist Laura Bell
We were drawn to Bell’s work because of the auditory, visual, and tactile experience that she is capable of achieving. Each of Bell’s abstract paintings portrays a highly idiosyncratic mindset, providing the viewer with her interpretation of a particular subjective, sensory experience. Her art focuses on the all-encompassing experience of a moment, with each work incorporating the experiential aspects of sound, thought, emotion, and physical feeling. Gadfly decided to ask the artist a few questions about her artistic quest.
SM: Where are you from?
LB: I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in the southwestern tip of Virginia but have been living in Charlottesville for most of the last four years.
SM: Who are your artistic influences?
LB: Although my style is not similar to his, Egon Schiele is one of my favorite artists. His figures and forms are often isolated from any context, and this allows a sort of grotesquely beautiful immediacy, the sort of immediate feelings I would like to convey in my work.
SM: How did you get started painting? Do you work in other media?
LB: It’s difficult to say whether I started painting out of sheer interest or boredom. Until I began public school in the eighth grade, I had created mostly realistic pencil drawings. I remember discovering oil paint to be particularly exciting because it added a time dimension acrylics and pencil do not provide. Because oils dry over weeks and months, intricate color schemes can be created, blended, and layered over a longer period of time, giving the work itself more flexibility. I find the medium itself to be more complicated because colors interact differently based on mixing mediums, paint brush, canvas type etc. It was a series of new relations that had to be learned through experimentation.
SM: Your art seems to play with notions of movement and sound. Where do you draw your inspiration from?
LB: In my first year at the University of Virginia, I felt a need to express what I experienced as thought flows. Rather than physical objects, I wanted to represent how physical sensations, including sight, sound, touch etc. combine to create ‘knowledge’ or accepted ideas. For example, how do you implicitly understand music? I see shapes and sounds which are related to my current and past understanding of what music is. When I first began, I wanted to allow the paint to lead the painting itself, meaning, I wanted to more specifically understand how the colors and paint dry and combine, and allow the painting to ‘grow’ from what existed while still creating an image that might invoke some sort of relateable emotion or image to the viewer. This is why the paintings are so varied because they do not represent one idea or perspective, but are supposed to relate how pockets of sensations are subconsciously put together, and how these pockets are what actually create our vast conception of reality.
SM: How does your process of creation work?
LB: Ideas for paintings usually grow over a period of weeks or months, perhaps I’ll find a sentence, or a combination of colors that I think have more to say than I initally think, so I will churn them over in the back of my mind until some substantial image begins to take hold, and I’ll start from there. I rarely ever sketch things out.
SM: What project are you currently working on?
LB: I am currently working on creating pieces that relate to knowledge ‘fragments’. I’m asking myself, how do you know what you know, how is any feeling of understanding created, and how could this mindset be visually represented. As usual it’s difficult to see where this will lead.
To see more of Laura’s art or to contact her, please visit: http://www.artbylaurabell.com/
