Bella Bigsby

Artwork

Title:
Trees in Snow
oil on canvas

Dimensions:
36 x 12 inches (each)

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$Artitst\\\'s studio$

Artist Statement

I am a self-taught artist. I work primarily in oil, but I also use watercolor and ink. From childhood, I have been fascinated by nature and have been driven to explore and describe it through art.

I grew up in Norfolk, England, relocating to California in 2002. It is now an ocean away, but the bleak yet beautiful landscape I left behind still informs much of my work. Although my new surroundings are a source of inspiration, those things that remind me of home, such as a birch tree in a garden, have a special emotional pull. I frequently return to Norfolk and this renews my connection to the land. Yet it also exists within me. It has become an internal landscape; a topography that maps my feelings for nature and home.

I am interested in the cycles of nature: the rise and fall of the seasons and the tides; the tension between the mutable and the perpetual, between the transitory life of a single bird, or tree and the continuity and strength of the species as a whole; the endless repetition of feather and leaf.

For me, nature is a separate yet parallel world. I am perhaps most interested in the quiet presence of this world, where it touches our everyday one, rather than in nature at its most grand and dramatic. An open tilled field, a roadside patch of grass, familiar birds such as crows and sparrows, all are endlessly rich in beauty and meaning when we turn to look.

Despite its closeness, this world is still a mysterious one. There is a sense of the unknowable and "other" that can border, even in our modern times, on the magical. Animals, birds and the land itself seem to be part of an ancient consciousness as they respond to the secret rhythms of nature. Trees come into bud. Migrating birds form orchestrated patterns in the sky. The tide ebbs and flows. This is a world with its own unfathomable language of shapes patterns and nuances. My paintings are an attempt to listen to this language.

There is a dialogue between people and nature. We respond to it emotionally, finding moods, feeling, and purpose in its complex patterns. Nature is woven through our myths and folklore where animals, birds, trees, and landscape take on a depth of consciousness, a soulfulness that transcends their physicality. I like to think I am part of this tradition.

Bella Bigsby

Artwork

Artist Statement

Artist Biography