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Student Artist Profile: John Bell

by Sarah Mirk

John Bell '08's hands are always covered in paint. When his paintings are still wet, the colors dripping down the front of the canvas as it hangs on the wall, he takes a palette knife and scrapes the thick layers of house paint or acrylic into, well, whatever he feels like.

"If you impose stuff on a canvas, it will inevitably go to hell," Bell said. The result is a collection of giant-sized, paint-splattered canvasses, sometimes as tall as six feet.

Bell is an art major who grew up in Rockford, Ill., with two artist parents. Since arriving at Grinnell, he has begun branching out from his traditional roots into an alternative painting style. While he has only been seriously painting for two years, Bell has developed an affinity for over-size, impulsive paintings.

Bell finds it difficult to put a name to exactly what he does. "The problem with painting is that everything has already been done," he said. "This is about taking different styles and twisting them in a new way." Bell has not settled on a single type of artistic expression and continues to see new artistic forms as performance and adventure.

Many of the works Bell has completed while at Grinnell are reminiscent of the flung paint and cacophonous colors of Jackson Pollock. Bell shies away from calling himself an abstract expressionist. "Abstract expressionist. I don't really like that because it puts a label on it," he said. "It means ?self-absorbed painting'? This stuff is inherently considered pretentious, and I don't want it to be."

Bell doubts his art will be widely embraced outside of Bucksbaum.

"These are paintings that people love to hate," Bell said, remarking that he believes he made one of his best paintings when he was four. "When you're painting as a kid, you don't have these preconceived notions of good and bad ? the more you practice this kind of art, you get better at letting go of what you're going for."

For Bell, painting is a performance. "These types of paintings are paintings about painting. It's about the physicality, it's about the smell, it's about the scratching," he said, as he ran his fingernails across the acrylic sticking out from a paint-splattered canvas. "If paintings are good, you see the action that went into it."

Bell believes that action cannot be planned. "[My work is] not autobiographical in the sense that when I'm depressed, I come in here and paint a black painting," he said. "It's more that I'm painting entirely on instinct."

His canvases dwarfed the others arranged on easels in the paint studio. The canvases have gotten so big that for some works, he no longer tacks the canvas to wooden frame backings. He just tapes the blank canvas to the wall.

"Paintings like this work better when they're big," he said. It's the size of the gesture in relation to the body."

He decides when his paintings are finished based on instinct, too, though admits that even when he decides a piece is done, it's never perfect.

"I see its failures still," he said, gazing at a work he finished off that morning with final splashes of bright red paint. "I haven't painted a painting I'm happy with yet."

Bell's new adventure in technique is attempting to recreate Rosarch inkblots, the famous psychological testing tool, on canvas. He has finished only one so far, a dark sploch on a muddy, earth-toned background. "This is a butterfly slash whatever you want it to be," he said. "In a lot of abstract pieces that I like, I saw a lot of similarity with the ambiguity, and I thought, how cool would it be to isolate that?"

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