Lucy Bell
Lucy Bell is an abstract painter whose work is drawn primarily from landscape. Lucy trained at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1982, and completed a Postgraduate Diploma at the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1987. A British Council Travel Scholarship then took Lucy to Bulgaria for 1988-89, based at the Art Academy in Sofia.
Awards include the Egerton Coghill Landscape Prize at Oxford University (1981), the David Murray Landscape Scholarship and the Jack Goldhill Business Sponsorship Award (both 1987). In 2001 Lucy was commissioned to make six paintings for the Club Quarters Hotel on Wacker Drive, Chicago.
The work spans oils, monotype, drawing and collage, in series that respond to East Anglian places: Suffolk fields and footpaths, woodland, and the old corn exchange and Withersfield Road in Haverhill. Lucy exhibits with the Royal Academy Schools Alumni East Anglia Group, and the work is held in public, corporate and private collections in the UK and abroad.
Artist Statement
I am an abstract painter in that I reshape what I see, what I am inspired by, which is primarily landscape. I cut up and rearrange drawings and mixed media work, whether derived from memories of places or abstracted from a photograph or sketch on the spot. The images are then made into paintings, sometimes reproduced exactly, sometimes used as a starting point. The emphasis is on the materials, the textures of paint and interactions of colour, form and edge. I see each work as a crafted object, with parallels to different qualities of textiles in the use of paint.
