Obscure sunshine

Dozier Bell at June Fitzpatrick

by Jenna Russell

"New Paintings by Dozier Bell" at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery, 112 High St., through August 26. Open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. 772-1961.

CONFLICT SERIES #55: Bell's light is often cut with murky, colorless masses of painterly air, ominous layers in keeping with a postmodern sensibility.

Dozier Bell, a Maine-born artist descended from generations of Mainers, tends to attract a moody brand of adjective: brooding, desolate, otherworldly, mysterious. Strangely, though, her work also elicits reactions of another, opposite bent -- soaring, it's been called, celestial, and romantic. Both kinds of statements are apt at the current Bell show in Portland, at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery through August 26.

These seven brand-new acrylics, each slightly larger than a foot square, span the range of symbols and subjects Bell has made her own over the years. There are stars and shifting clouds and distant suns, and there are the purposeful man-made marks that balance nature's boundlessness, the telescope-eye bomb sights, dotted map lines, and grids. Bell has said that individual titles are a convenience, and she thinks of all her artworks as related. It's an interesting statement, and it doesn't mean the pieces at June Fitzpatrick are all strikingly similar. While "15:00" is in many ways a traditional landscape, a peaceful, pastoral throwback, "Sortie, Study" is thoroughly modern in the way it defies any easy deconstruction. Yet even between the extremes, a viewer understands what Bell means about the body of her work. There are connections between the paintings here, like thematic threads joining journal entries from the same road trip. We feel the presence of a lone observer in orbit, as she studies the same points in time and space from different angles.

And what are those points being studied so closely? It's impossible to say for certain -- thus the art's oft-mentioned "mysterious" quality. In the current show, two of the more evocative paintings are among the more obscure, but they strive to communicate, if we listen hard. "Trace Map" looks at first like a cloudy sky, but when we notice crisscrossing chart lines -- latitude? longitude? -- and a faint, red-and-white, map-style border at the top, the painting becomes a view of continents from space, drifting cloud cover obscuring some areas. Dotted directionals curve around the coast, but the compass is missing, and we struggle for orientation. The painting feels like a portrait of uncertainty, the very essence of the "lost" sensation. The map may track ambiguous emotional terrain, plotted on paper by a traveler making shaky reference to the crowded, close-up view inside his or her heart or head.

If "Trace Map" charts emotion as shifting as weather, "Sortie, Study" depicts the consequences of feelings not allowed to move freely in the atmosphere. The painting shows a slanting wall of rock or sheer cliff, a small hole blown in its side halfway down, with violent light blasting out of the opening. Small shards of shattered solid fly away through the air, and the scene could be a broken water pipe in need of a plumber. Sticking with a vision of the landscape of human emotion, we see the small tear in the personal armor where everything -- pent-up passion, rage -- pours out uncontrolled. The target sight superimposed over the break marks it as a scene of human warfare, with guns or words for weapons. References to war are often a part of Bell's work.

Critics have observed that the dramatic light Bell favors is descended from that of Turner and American landscape painters who demonstrated man's smallness in the almighty face of nature. There is an essential note of wonder shared between them, though Bell's skies are milder, lacking any blatant sunset pinks or miracle sunbeams. Where her forebears sometimes placed tiny human figures in the landscape's vastness, Bell uses less overtly figurative symbols, like the featureless post or tower that sits atop the ridge in "Pin." She's a long way from early American painters who celebrated the expansive mood of a young, triumphant nation; her light is often cut with murky, colorless masses of painterly air, ominous layers in keeping with a postmodern sensibility. The sun is not a god, dazzling in its power, but a dulled, distant white disc behind the gray and yellow gauze of "Oculus." Maybe the haze is of our own making, the product of our environmental disregard. It seems worth noting, though, that when darkness falls, the stars in Bell's "Star Field" have all of their power.

The painting of the night sky possesses a silky soft, unreal light, and it's impossible to call it real or abstract. Artists probably paint stars for the same reasons parents paste glow-in-the-dark constellations on their children's ceilings: because light in the dark, especially a light that seems eternal, is one of those few true, universal comforts. Bell's art is not about comfort, but she doesn't disallow it. Comfort, with fear and confusion, is part of the natural spectrum.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.