artist profile
The Very Weird Elegance of
Patricia Bellan-Gillen by Lydia E. Denkler
L
ook once and Patricia Bellan-Gillen’s Tsunami 2 exudes the beauty and whimsy of a classically constructed fairytale illustration. Here is a boy protected in
a hideaway of leaves and grasses. Lovely yes, but take a step closer and you enter the more dangerous world of childhood. What first looked like a place of sweet safety is, on closer inspection, a dark and threatening environment. Almost life-size in scale, the artist’s work can’t help but draw you into this scene. You become the artist’s guest, invited to put your own story to the symbols: an innocent boy, an old TV, a saw, the safety of nature, and then, a tsunami. There’s no heavy-handed transference of meaning here. Instead she invites you to open your imagination to a range of associations and emotions.
Bellan-Gillen is a classically trained artist who can balance scholarship with wild flights of imagination. She is both a highly skilled draftsman and a master of assemblage. A native Pennsylvanian, Bellan-Gillen lives and works in rural Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, surrounded by 600 acres of wooded terrain. Carnegie Mellon University, where she is the Dorothy Stubnitz Professor of Art, has honored her with the Ryan Award for excellence in teaching. Bellan-Gillen has served as one of the
photo: vince gillen
This body of work provokes us with a clash of beauty and awkwardness. She unfolds worlds that reflect grace and humor and what she calls a “weird elegance.” Her symbolic language creates a space for conflict to reside by humor and humor by darkness.
Bellan-Gillen embraces the “uncontrolled” design features in her multi-layered mixed-media creations. Vibrant images and motifs reappear throughout this body of work, many gleaned from the artist’s years studying mythologies, Jungian dream symbols, and ancient manuscripts. Her technique of layering fragmented pieces of narrative creates a reverberation in the subconscious. No two viewers will have the same experience because each brings their own interpretation to the conflicting images. Her mixing of symbols is the provocative trigger. The artist says, “My work isn’t complete until someone tells me a story about it I don’t know.”
background: Clearing (A Fairytale), 2013, Acrylic, colored pencil, silverpoint ground on birch panel, 82” x 120” 76 | July 2O13 NashvilleArts.com