dozier bell

Genius loci

August 10 – September 15, 2024

Sarah Bouchard Gallery is honored to present Dozier Bell’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Genius loci features new work created over the past three years, inspired primarily by three stays on Monhegan Island. This exhibit embodies a reckoning with the unseen forces that shape and transform our lives.

Exhibition Views Artist Statement Selected Works Press

Artist Statement

For the truths that the intelligence grasps directly and openly in the full-lighted world are somehow less profound, less indispensable than those which life has communicated to us without our knowledge through the form of impressions, material because they have come to us through our senses, but the inner meaning of which we can discern.

— Proust

The work in this show was done during a time of transitions. From my first stay on Monhegan in 2019, to the Covid years, to moving house last year on the basis of an intuitive prompting that couldn’t be quieted, I have become increasingly aware of the strength and tenacity of the forces that shape our lives behind scenes in which we believe we are the active agents.

Much of the work here documents three stays on Monhegan. The stillness and the quality of light made such deep impressions on me the first time, in particular, that I have continued to work from some of those initial images. Manana, twilight, done from a small watercolor and a slightly larger oil study, is one of them.

Other pieces — Settlement; Cloudburst; April; Equinox moon — are extrapolations of impressions that were felt as much as seen. Still others are scenes from everyday life that have become interiorized: Pines near the river; Wheeling, cloud cover; Winter window; Bowman Island.

Vernal pool was the first painting to be done in the new home and studio, where high water in early spring created an endlessly mysterious play of moonlight in trapped pools of water on the banks of the river below. As I worked on it, the demands of the past few years’ transitions fell into perspective as necessary changes in the service of the genius loci, the very particular spirit of place that neither explains nor justifies itself.