SW5 Notebook, Profile Gallery 286, November 2008

It is fair to say that, when I got up this morning, I wasn’t expecting the day to bring a run-in with a giant green holographic head.

Work list

Gallery 286 is pleased to welcome back Edward Bell with an exhibition of skyscapes and landscapes, painted ‘en plein air’ in oil on canvas or board.

Edward produced these paintings over the period of a year with not a day missed – whatever the weather. They were painted mainly along the borderlands of England and Wales, in Ireland North and South, and between the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland…all of which, regardless of boundaries, share the same ‘One Sky’.

Installation Views

Exhibitions at Gallery 286

• 2018
• 2016
• 2015
• 2013
• 2008
• 2006

Images of work from Andrew Ryder’s collection

Figures run, trying to be the fastest.

Families picnic in the park.

Parachutes hang in the air above a ferris wheel.

These are scenes of people at play, some seeking the buzz of adrenaline, part of the fun.

The car suddenly drops on the roller coaster.

These paintings look at the human desire to flirt with death and our fascination with catastrophe.

Often thrill seeking is juxtaposed with a real, impending threat.

Each piece holds in stasis an unfolding event. Often the different speeds of the brush: slow, careful pointillism or sweeping gestural mark vie with each other and echo the struggle for containment within the painting.

Some paintings are ambiguous. Is the white paint drawn across the bare linen just light behind the figures or is it approaching smoke?

Sometimes a disaster is clearly happening. An explosion detonated on a busy street sets in motion a pyrotechnic display that completely engulfs the twinkling fairy lights.

The figures are at once present and absent. Often they are just a space of blank canvas. As silhouettes they each display individual characteristics while being part of the mass, a crowd of strangers.

Referencing contemporary graphic novels, pop art and nineteenth century Japanese print these paintings are also influenced by film. Film is, perhaps, the medium most concerned with disaster as spectacle.

The “Helter Skelter” group of paintings ask questions about how we deal with fear, how we process unprecedented events and how we view our fellow human beings in emergency.

Do we know what we’d do? Can we imagine what we’d see?

By exploring these questions the paintings seek to exorcise some of the demons that from the paranoia of contemporary, urban existence.

Rachael Weitzman May 2008