Spotlight Artist

Olivia K. Bell

West
Artist profile photo

from which it spills

Abstract painting of a pink-skinned person lounging by a tree in a colorful, lush garden.

oil on canvas

Loquat Tree (table)

Colorful painting of six people sitting around a round table, with bright, abstract colors.

oil on canvas

Park Bench

Person with bright red skin sits on a bench, surrounded by green ghostly figures.

oil and collage on canvas

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement

 Rooted in anxieties of loss, grief, and an unstable environment, through painting I embrace the flux of time. My subjects are a constellation of intertwined figures, landscape, and objects. These fragmented compositions mirror the tangled, dissociative mind in which one thought conjures a million others that then form an entangled web.

The intensity of the climate in which I grew up imbues each scene with a specificity that mirrors my recollections of it. The oppressive heat of the Texas sun sharpens, burns, heightens, and lays a state of lethargy upon everything it reaches. Figures and their surroundings merge, shaped by the weight of the sun. The layering of multiple subjects creates a haze that imitates the passage of time and the crowded forms of remembrance.

The shadow from a branch cast on a leg; the low hum of a wasp; the condensation of a bottle; the smell while we would wade through the creek—these moments are no longer sequential but simultaneous. I focus on the in-between, where memory slips and reassembles, where time softens and folds.

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