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Deus
Misereatur
Watercolor,
ink, and acrylic on paper
Statement:
As a woman who is drawn to work from the Medieval period, I
wonder about many things, such as what it must have been like
to be a female scribe 1,000 years ago, and if that would even
have been possible in a society in which women’s voices were
not often heard. I’ve also often found that my script has a
certain fluidity to it that is quite different from the script
in the old manuscripts, and I’ve often wondered if that is
simply because I’ve never really seen another woman’s writing
in them; most of the books dedicated to or commissioned by
women were still illuminated by men. Virginia Woolf said that
women must construct “a woman’s sentence” in order for their
voices and their writing to be genuine, and that is one of the
ideas present in my work, which is essentially prayer
expressed in a visual form.
Bio:
Lisa Bell is an honors graduate of Pratt Institute in
Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA in Painting, with a History of
Art minor, focusing on Early Christian and Medieval Art. Her
work is a fusion of these two fields of study, combining
illuminated manuscripts, and texts taken from traditional
liturgy and Scripture, with heavy, visceral fields of color.
It is essentially a marriage of Medieval mysticism and
blood-and-guts faith existing in the present moment, which is
where time touches eternity, where prayer and human longing
touch God. The resulting illuminations are as heavily rooted
in centuries old manuscripts as they are in the world in which
we live, and move, and have our physical being. Lisa currently
lives and works in Hartford, CT. |
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