Shaped canvases and creative framing add interest to Trevor Bell's work, but his gift is his vivid and inventive palette.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published March 14, 2004
[Images from Gulf Coast Museum of Art]
Trevor Bell, The Sixes (Six), 1980, acrylic on canvas.
Trevor Bell, Blue Radial, 1985, acrylic on canvas.
Trevor Bell, The Sixes (Two), 1980, acrylic on canvas.
LARGO - If you feel like wading into the philosophical world's equivalent of a mosh pit, just pose this question to some of Western civilization's great thinkers: What is color?
I'll spare you the dialectic that pits Plato against St. Thomas Aquinas and Decartes against Locke.
Instead, I'll cut right to Goethe: "All theories, dear friend, are grey; the golden tree of life is green." For what do intellectual arguments matter when you come upon color so voluptuous as to be a life force, illusory or not? That's what I thought while looking at a collection of paintings by Trevor Bell at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art.
Bell, a native of England, came to Florida in the 1970s, painting and teaching at Florida State University until the 1990s. He was already known for his shaped canvases, cut into forms ranging from anthropomorphic to geometric, and for favoring a somber, abstract expressionist palette and sensibility.
Once he hit Florida, the scales seem to have fallen from his eyes. Along with pairing lush pastels with bright primaries, Bell manages such odd couplings as avocado green with cerise, purple with brown, sometimes soaking the canvases in layers of thin washes that bleed together, sometimes corraling them into specific shapes that live in alternating harmony and confrontation.
In Tall Seven, vertical canvases are lined up like pillars, painted almost identically. In all of them, plumes of yellow darkening to orange shoot up through a background that also changes, from turquoise to blue to lavender. Stare at them for a while and you begin to question what colors you're actually seeing, wondering when one color becomes the next and how the gradations in one canvas relate to the others.
He uses the same collective organization in canvases from his series The Sixes, using yellow as a point of departure. Only five of the six are here, which is unfortunate because together, they read like a history of that color, beginning with its birth in The Sixes (One), not in this show. In it, a single column is set against subtle slashes of deep blues, out of which yellow emerges from a green shadow and starts to grow upward toward the top of the column bathed in roseate tones. Yellow has split like a zygote in The Sixes (Two), and a fertile green has replaced the womblike blue background.
The theme of color as life is developed through the other four canvases in the series, each adding a column, blending and melding yellow in increasing intensity and volume. By the time you get to The Sixes (Five), it dominates the canvas in saturated richness, the columns firmly connected at the bottom and wavering together at the top like slowly closing fingers. It's as intense as a sunspot, and in the final painting of the series, yellow has all but flamed out, receding behind a fireball of orange, the rose and blue, now bands of a sunset, supplanting it. Could abstract paintings be any more narrative?
Blue Radial all but sets its colors in motion. The painting consists of three canvases, cut like asymmetrical pie wedges, the small center one spiking through the other two like an aggressive middle sibling. Shades of blue predominate, feathered into curves and angles that mimic the canvases. More aggressive are slashes of yellow and red, mixed to create prismatic tonal flows that rim the curves of the two large, outer wedges and bisect them in angular lines that are kept from meeting by that smaller third wedge now acting as the cog that stops the whole turning gyre.
Some of the canvases have more fluid shapes, like the primordial North Coast II, a later painting in which Bell seems to be returning to darker colors. It reads like a creation story, in which the hovering void, here represented by a swath of black, looks about to be banished while below, patches of browns and blues separate like the seas receding from the land. It's painted as an aerial view of a scene in which we, godlike, look down and see that it is good.
The shaped canvases, in modifying and relating to the spaces around them, approach but do not ever quite become sculpture, perhaps because Bell himself seems to have no ambivalence about his role as a painter, first and foremost. The exceptions are those that are "framed" in wood that emulates both the shape of the canvases and the forms painted on them. For a gimmick like that to work, it has to add something to the overall idea. I find these to be a distraction, not an enhancement. They're also a little too obvious. In one, the frame coils loosely around an egg-shaped canvas, painted with a spiral of muted colors. In another ovoid canvas, the frame is attached top and bottom like tongs, that reappear in the painting in white, floating on a light blue field. Neither of these "sculpto-paintings" is nearly as interesting, subtle or complex as those that do not try to multitask.
Color is what Bell understands, its immediacy and primacy, without need of explanations or theory.
Goethe's right. The tree of life is green and, Bell would add, every other color combination you can make with red, blue and yellow. How we see them all is for a rarefied few to figure out. That we see and can respond belongs to us all.
"Trevor Bell: The Florida Years" is at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, 12211 Walsingham Road, Largo, through April 18. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 adults, $4 seniors, $3 students and free for children under 12. Free on Thursday. (727) 518-6833.
