In 1955, Bell moved from Yorkshire to West Cornwall, and found himself part of the community of abstract artists that had made their home there. But unlike many of his St Ives contemporaries, Bell was never really a Modernist artist, concerned with the pursuit of pure forms or exploring the limits of painting. He was someone who followed his own meta-physical path, constantly crossing boundaries and navigating the unseen, seeing each painting as an expression or part of something bigger.

Bell wanted his paintings to become objects, his experiences to become sensations, and his colours and forms to be an actual presence. Yet the problem he found when using conventional canvases, with their right angled corners and straight edges, is that the viewing gaze is instinctively drawn inwards and held within the space of the painting. So, in the 1960’s, Bell began to work with shaped canvases, using lines he had drawn spontaneously onto the studio wall as templates for bending the wooden frames of his canvases into sinuous forms. These ‘active contours’ didn’t draw the eye in, but forced it outwards to the edges, and from the edges into the space beyond. Colours and forms were no longer contained by solid, hard borders or reduced to an element of visual language, they existed in their own right; a mesmerising presence whose dynamic energy seemed to flow into the world.

Most recently, Bell had pushed the potential of the active contour even further in constructions such as Bird[2016] and Balance[2016], where he created a visual see-saw, with two canvases balanced on top of a curving timber arc. The image has become a sculptural object and colour has become a noun with weight and relativity.

The colours that saturate Bell’s canvases have an obvious presence, but so do the marks that bring them into the world. They provide a choreographic notation of Bell’s moving arm; tracing intent and hesitation, the passage of time and the consistency of the paint flowing through the bristles of the brush. Like words, these graphic gestures and descriptive lines bring character to the canvas, helping to introduce each work’s visual narrative;

Some of Bell’s gestures are a bold statement, sending the viewer’s gaze scurrying across the painted surface and beyond; the clash of colour against colour leaving a livid scar as their electric borders erupt in a burst of uncontrollable visual energy. Others are like a pigment whisper that leaves a barely perceptible trace as one tone gently dissolves into another, generating an evanescent haze.

Bell’s lines don’t always occur on the surface of the canvas, however. With our gaze directed towards the painting’s edge we become aware of those shadow-lines and imperceptible highlights that paint the surrounding wall. They create a constantly shifting penumbra that animates and activates these works, an edge, yet not an edge, holding and caressing them, blurring and blending the solid and the immaterial. Bell deliberately explored this transitional space in works such as Windance 1 and 2[2010], where the wooden lines that usually define each canvas’s border have been freed to follow a lyrical path of their own. They tease and probe this liminal zone, reaching out into the unknown, whilst attached to the familiar.

Bell’s work has a zen-like simplicity: a self-contained rootedness in that space between inhalation and exhalation, which is the present. At one level they are about nothing: they don't refer to anything, they are not subject to anything - They are. But at the same time they are also products of embodiment. Their colours and forms are born out of an artist who stood in the Himalayas and contemplated the dance of clouds scudding across the sky, and looked down on rivers carving their path through distant valleys; someone who watched a rocket launch into space in a blaze of luminous energy, and who stood each day and looked out at the wind-scoured landscape around his studio. Bell translated these experiences into sensations, using colour and form to evoke the meta-physical, exposing the moment when matter transitions from being into nothingness, and formlessness becomes form.

Bell’s desire to transcend the limits of form lies at the heart of this posthumous work and exhibition, Trans-Form, which was initiated with his blessing before his death in November 2017. As an artist who had constantly sought to cross the boundaries of his paintings, he had been fascinated at how they might also cross the boundaries between different art forms. He was particularly interested in the possibility of working with a composer and choreographer to create a work that explored the intersections of these different languages. Whilst, he himself would never see the results of this collaboration, the conversation that occurs between Bell’s paintings, Jamie Mills’ sound and Sarah Fairhall’s and Lois Taylor’s movement, brings this project to striking fruition.

To look at Bell’s paintings, whilst enveloped by Mill’s music and Fairhall and Taylor’s choreographed response, is to be reminded of form’s bodily origins. Here are slow breaths as white is born, the staccato edges of a line as the pianist’s fingers depress a piano’s keys, before slowly dissolving into the surrounding silence, the long legato of a sweeping gesture, or the frenzied sounds as tiny marks claw their way into being through blazing white. Sounds sweep and soar as lines dance across windswept surface and bodies rise and fall in exaltation. They echo, pulsate, blur, vibrate, build and linger. Colour may come from outside us, a star-born revelation that reveals the world in technicolour glory, but form comes from within, born of our bodies and movement; a universal language that ultimately transcends music, painting, dance and even our individual selves.


(Richard Davey is an internationally published author, curator and member of the International ‘Association of Art Critics’. He is a judge of the John Moores Painting Prize 2016 and recently wrote the major exhibition publication for Anselm Kiefer’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 2014 alongside the 2015 and 20 16 ‘RA Summer Exhibition’ catalogues.)