About:
Roddy Bell is Scottish/Norwegian and has been a resident in Norway since 1979.
His work consists of separate activities (drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, installations, video). These activities often merge and interact with each other.Working within several disciplines, often at the same time, Bells work often stands outside of contemporary currents, verging towards a form for outsider art. Exploring areas of spirituality and metaphysics, his work is quietly subversive. There is a balance between humour, light, and an undermining sense of darkness that requires several viewings to become apparent.The installations involve the use of electronics and rough, primitive constructions, with digitally composed voices and sounds in a bizarre mix.The paintings and drawings are often small, humorous, but also dark, philosophically speculative and recognisably personal. work with painting and occasionally with sculpture in a relatively figurative manner. Often, I take my point of departure from other artworks, particularly of the early renaissance, and re-interpret them and link them to a contemporary mind set.
Portraiture:
Portraiture interests me and so I make portraits of distinguished figures who intrigue me or for whom have great admiration, people such as the writers Philip Pullman, Jorge Luis Borges and Dylan Thomas, and composers like Mahler and Ravel, and even more mythical figures like T.E. Lawrence and escapologist Harry Houdini, among many others. You can see my portraits as an allegorical diary: the persons whom I paint represent thoughts or ideas that occupied my mind or struck me. It’s about empathy. See it as a tribute, a present to the person portrayed. I do not paint portraits in a traditional sense. They do not aim for true-to-life representation of the person portrayed, but rather I try to arrive at a personal vision and a unique interpretation of the subject. It is not the image that matters, but it is all about perception and imagination.
What is the relationship between depiction and fiction? When one chooses a subject that is widely known for a specific activity, for example a composer or philosopher, the subject will have an established public persona.
How does my personal vision of the subject meet with this public persona? And how can one expand the content of the portrait by using objects, symbols, or metaphors to represent the subject's identity, personality, or attributes?
The "B" series:
In visual portraiture, people who exist or have existed can have portraits that are fictionalized by being given properties that they do not or have not obtained. Conversely fictional characters can also be portrayed in ways that echo the traits of real individuals. Portraiture as an intersection where depiction is interwoven with fiction, making it unclear what has been observed and what has been imagined. I work within this area where the subjects I have chosen to depict, are visualized as existing within this twilight zone of fiction and depiction. The most recent work “The B.” series, has been dedicated to a close friend who has recently died. An english artist who was accomplished both as sculptor, painter, performance artist and author, and who I had the honour of exhibiting together with in 2021. I felt a need to process his passing by making a series of works that portrayed him through a fictionalisation based on the fictionalised characters he had created through his work as a performance artist and author. Having attended many of his performances over the years, I have had a rich source of mental imagery from which to draw upon. I am creating fictional characters which take their point of departure from the performative characters he created. These characters combine a sense of vaudeville humour, with the ridiculous and tragic, and these are the characteristics which I want to express and which I feel best suited to honour his passing.