"These brooding, almost monochromatic canvases have primordial subjects that transcend time and place. They share a limited palette of techniques and subjects: countless variations of gray in both high relief and subtle fluctuation; landscapes dominated by - or indistinguishable from - cosmic imagery from deep space; and reoccurring visions of fire, enigmatic posts standing like signal cairns and the literal marks of contemporary technology.

This 40-year-old Maine woman's aesthetic, repeated again and again in the exhibit, is enhanced, not diminished, by repetition.

Particularly in her triptychs and diptychs, with their religious implications, she compresses eons into a visual and philosophical Big Bang. Her finest exemplars are the 3 foot by 4 foot triptych "Field" and the 4 foot by 5 foot diptych "Litany." Both are acrylic on canvas and quite recent —"Field" from 1996 and "Litany" from earlier this year. When her paintings and black-and-white photo collages are assembled in the two Lyman Allyn gallery rooms, their serial quality is unmistakable. And in these two recent paintings, her intensely focused subject matter coalesces into its most riveting expression...

The three panels of "Field" leap across light years. In one panel, faint cosmic gases haze across an icy deep space. To its right, more terrestrial clouds coalesce in faint hints of yellows and blues. Anchoring the triptych is a brooding and powerful landscape in stark monochrome. Here we have a vision of our past—or is it our future? In a style unmistakably linked to that of Turner's smoky seascapes, she presents an enigmatic haze of implied Earth shrouded in smoke. Are those post-apocalyptic fires on the horizon? Is it a coal-fired Industrial Revolution? Or are those signal fires from early man? Completing Bell's leap across the light years is the mark of modern computer technology, firmly grounding this painting in our time. Across the deep space panel are the fine, precise lines of computer graphics, the grids and arcs that subdivide infinite space into human portions.
In the larger, more powerful "Litany," the imagery is reduced by one panel. Here, the panel depicting deep space is more vivid, more dramatic. The clouds of cosmic gases boil with faint tints of yellow and blue, evocative of the Hubbell Telescope photos that peer to the very edge of time. And delineating this primordial maelstrom are the cold, hatch-marks and geometry of computer mapping. In this diptych, the second panel anchoring the work is the most powerful of Bell's Turner-esque black-and-white landscapes. Again, smoke from a fiery horizon shrouds the sky, and this landscape is marked with suggestive structures, implied but imperfect in the haze. They could be man-made, or they could be a darker vision of the 19th-century stereotype of a sublime view. And marking this landscape are a pair of poles — or are they smokestacks?

In two examples of a series painted in this decade— Map #1 (1991) and Map #7 (1997)-the monochromatic eye looks downward toward the planet, not outward to the skies. Broadly based on satellite eye-in-the-sky photos, dark shorelines are familiar to anyone who's ever read a map, but the oceans have been transformed into subtle shadings of clouds, drifting like Maine sea smoke to blur the boundaries. In a series Bell painted during an artist's residency in Germany, a new, unsettling image enters her world. While a Fulbright fellow in Weimar, Germany, she lived in the shadow of the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald....Considering the artist's proximity to Buchenwald, the linkage of the medieval plague and the Holocaust seem inevitable, so in Bell's two triptychs entitled "Heimsuchung" (Visitation), a new element enters the mix of cosmic imagery: huddled rats. Make of that what you will.