The paintings of Dozier Bell....seem to be engaged in an other kind of search. Here the images, whether observed or imagined, are transmuted into something...hermetic and mysterious. It is a world very far removed from any sun-filled pastoral idyll. In them, we are introduced to a world of shadows, and it requires at times a certain adjustment in one's vision to see exactly what there is to see. The light in Bell's paintings seems to be a kind of permanent and unrelieved twilight, grey, bleak and shadowy, without color or sharp contrast. They are extremely austere---almost diagrammatic at times, but they are also paintings of astonishing visual delicacy.

For Bell, it seems that being in the world is to be constantly making one's place, both consciously and in one's imagination. This accounts, perhaps, for the recurring presence in her oeuvre of a certain repertoire of forms and pictorial motifs such as grids, poles, cross-hairs—measuring devices which serve as mental constructs for locating one's existence in time and space. By constructing her paintings of multiple panels each physically discrete from one another, Bell adds a further note of spatial ambiguity and shifting visual perspective, to suggest the ephemeral nature of time. However our perception of these works---of their synthesis of specific and general, fragment and whole---is such that the individual images are compositely experienced and always understood as the contents of a single composition.

In her 1998 diptych - "Litany", there is a sense of repressive austerity and pared-down beauty in the way in which the images have been presented. In the lower panel, Bell has painted a smoggy and troubled landscape vista which leaves us wondering....whether we are viewing a scene in which the lights of civilization have just sputtered out in some unforeseen technologically-induced apocalypse: the utter eeriness of the scene combines with the reductive imagery and fuzzy illusionism to create a palpable sense of enigma and mystery. In the panel directly above is a beautifully painted image of the cosmos or some far distant galaxy, in whose vast boundless depths appear to reside those intangible qualities of nature—the mutable, the transient, and the infinite---whose presence always remains invisible while nonetheless existent. Embedded within this image is Bell's familiar "cross-hairs" motif which functions as a kind of abstract unit of measure, alluding to the trace of man's presence in the world and also perhaps, of our potential for becoming a destructive, threatening force.

Paintings of this intensely inward character, paintings that are at once symbolic in meaning yet elusive in their references, do not readily disclose their mysteries. They draw us into a world of private associations and obscure memories as familiar as our own dreams but as resistant to easy interpretation as the profoundest dreams tend to be. In this mindscape everything is subtly realized in purely visual terms, yet haunted by an aura that seems to lie just beyond the visible. In this respect, Bell's paintings have a kinship with certain modes of lyric poetry, and require in the ‘reader' the kind of concentration one brings to poetry of that order.