...Even in Maine's artistic '80's, Dozier Bell's work stood out. Her paintings revealed a spare, bleak landscape that seemed both warning and reflection. While others were painting Maine's rich, luscious vistas, Bell exposed the underside of Maine, the shadow beneath its beauty. Her vision was so powerful and complete that I once wondered where she could go from there. At a show on view from March 29-April 29 at the Schmidt-Bingham Gallery at 41 East 57th St., Bell has moved from the local to the universal and from the temporal to the eternal. This work is as daring and direct as her previous paintings, and more comprehensive. While continuing to offer a reading on the health of the landscape, she has also taken to examining the cosmos. She accomplishes this through multi-paneled paintings such as "Kyrie," a triptych of three equal-sized vertical canvases. Her palette is limited: though subtle pinks and blues permeate the canvases, the overall impression is of black, white and gray. On the left, as the viewer sees it, there's a dark canvas with stars, some quite brilliant. The center image is of clouds in a pale, pinkish-gray sky. To the right there is land, seen as an aerial view: a hill with greenish-gray shapes, thought the actual image is unclear.

It appears to be vaguely forested, but it also references Japanese screens and the devastated vistas of German artist Anselm Kiefer. Clearly, we're not in Maine anymore; somehow, we've been transported to Germany. The landscape seems destroyed, but oddly beautiful, much in the way photos of bombed-out Dresden have a stunning finality.

Presented in this and other of the show's triptychs are layers of human comprehension; the cosmos, the atmoshpere, the Earth. Bell's canvases transport us beyond the surface of what we know, yet keep us grounded within it. As in previous work, the images seem dire; her use of lines, site marks and compass-like circles can't help but be viewed with trepidation. There's a sense that someone, something, is watching us, giving a deadline for our destruction.

The center of the show is a triptych measuring more than 5 x 8 feet, called "Signal." In this, the middle panel is three times the size of adjacent side panels. Bell has painted a vibrant sun dramatically obscured by gathering clouds. To the right is a kind of delta, reaching to a firm horizon high on the canvas. To the left is what appears to be a small, ruined cemetery, surrounded by stakes of a barbed wire fence. Again, the imagery can't help but refer to war, to destruction, and to the German landscape as a symbol of death.

Bell, a sixth-generation Mainer, was given a Fulbright in 1995 and chose to spend it in Weimar. Clearly, the influence is still present. While her work is not about World War II, through these images that war becomes all war, all destruction. "Surface, II" is another large painting, though not a triptych. Almost Turneresque, an ocean leads to a clouded sky. At the edge of the horizon, there are lights; of fire, of a city on the water - it's not clear. Again, Bell paints an odd combination of menace and hope. These lights could be from a distant floating kingdom of heaven.

These intense images are unsettling because they are so ambiguous. As portaits of the universe, the portrayals of clouds, sky and stars are so intrinsically beautiful that there is almost a romanticism to the work. The ambiguity is intentional. Bell writes of "Signal": "Signs and signals are not always a clear indication of what is to follow, and I think the painting seeks to address the effort to understand the meaning of a signal... The moment in which we become aware of a signal, and before we understand its meaning, is full of both fear and hope. Nothing is clear."