John Bell

Gallery Affiliations: Brett Wesley Gallery, Cancio Contemporary, Mondo Fine Art

Region: Midwest

I think of myself as a figurative artist who strives to depict animals as verbs rather than nouns. Freed from the rules and limitations of the empirical, as an artist I can avail myself of the luxury of dismissing the named subject, the noun-subject, as a classification with limitations. The really exciting part for me is not in discovering what something is, but in discovering that it can do so many different things. I want my pictures to operate in the realm of potential—in imagining and bringing to life the heterogeneous and near limitless variety of form that life can take on to particularize itself and still survive. I want my artwork to serve as a small reminder that life is not rational—life constantly reinvents itself. Life bubbles over any container that we put around it.