Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Jay Bell: Reason to Believe, an exhibition of new paintings by the Encinitas-based artist. Working directly from photos taken in his travels around California, Mexico and beyond, Bell paints portraits of communities by capturing the vehicles that carry them. Parked in neighborhoods, commercial corridors, parking lots and scenic vistas, these cars, trucks and vans speak to the economic and personal ambitions and realities of contemporary life, as well as the hopes and dreams of people across all communities. In a place like Southern California, where a vehicle can represent not only freedom and possibility, but also a hard-won grasp on work or shelter, Bell’s paintings serve as platforms for community storytelling. 

The exhibition takes its title from Bruce Springsteen’s Reason to Believe, the closing song on his 1982 album Nebraska. Through a series of portraits of ordinary people confronting disappointment, loss, and uncertainty, Springsteen considers the remarkable human capacity to keep believing, even when the world offers little reason to do so. Bell finds a similar spirit in the vehicles he encounters along the streets and highways of California and Mexico. A battered pickup truck, a mysterious van, or a hot rod project car can represent more than transportation. Each is an investment in the possibility of something greater. They represent another economic opportunity, a shared dream, or simply the freedom to move through the world.

In a car-centric society, a car is like an extension of self, and these paintings function as portraits of the people behind the wheel. Without a word, they speak to socioeconomic status, stylistic preference, and decisions around how to present oneself to the world. Many are nostalgic — like the classic Volkswagen Beetle that Bell’s mother drove or a reliable truck passed between generations. For all their utilitarian functionality, vehicles can elicit strong emotions, be it pride, appreciation, nostalgia, or wariness. Bell’s project began with paintings of the cars he had owned throughout his life, and widened to include the cars driven by friends and family members. Realizing the universal potential of the subject, Bell expanded the project to the level of community portrait, capturing a deep sense of place through the particular lens of cars, vans, and trucks.

The majority of these paintings depict their subjects side-on, showing the full vehicle centered within a distinctive regional landscape — as if a car parked itself in the middle of a landscape painting. Working in rich, saturated tones, Bell’s landscapes veer into abstraction. A typical roadside eucalyptus becomes a haunting, sprawling shadow; hillside brush and palm treetops are rendered as fields of interlocking brushstrokes; and suburban office parks become blocks of flat color like de Stijl exposed to the California sun. These landscapes revel in the architectural and ecological similarities between communities on both sides of the border — it’s difficult to discern whether a painting captures small town coastal communities in San Diego or Todos Santos. The hillside neighborhoods, stucco houses, and roadside fruit stands found up and down the Pacific coast speak to a connectedness that can be forgotten amid the present rise of border walls and immigration enforcement. Bell works to erase these distinctions by foregrounding common ground that bridges lines that often divide.

The most distinctive paintings of the group capture trucks of all kinds. Bell recognizes the truck as one of the greatest economic development tools in existence, one that allows for almost endless creative use and often symbolizes a breakthrough in business prospects. The distinctive typologies of truck interest Bell, from the squat Ford Rangers popular in Mexico repurposed as fruit stands and flatbeds to the lifted white pickups of suburban America. Each vehicle alludes to the economic realities of a particular individual, and together they speak to issues of class and labor that have become increasingly complex in these kinds of quickly-gentrifying coastal communities.

With this series Bell also plays with material, working in some cases on heavy denim and elsewhere on fine linen. Denim’s working-class roots lend an extra layer of authenticity to paintings of trucks essentially functioning as small businesses, while the juxtaposition of brawny muscle cars and fine linen supports brings together two very different definitions of elegance. Working in the tradition of California artists using the sprawling urban landscape to tell the story of its inhabitants — one that includes Cool School artists like Ed Ruscha, whose revelatory 1960s documentary works immortalized LA’s famous streets, and contemporary painters such as Hilary Pecis, whose highly personal visions of California capture life at street level.

At a moment when economic disparity, false scarcity, and hostility toward immigrants threaten the bonds between communities, Bell’s paintings insist on recognizing the dignity of ordinary lives. Across manufactured borders, neighborhoods, and economic circumstances, people continue to work, build, care for their families, and imagine a better future. Their vehicles become quiet monuments to that persistence, not simply symbols of easy optimism, but evidence of the enduring human need for a reason to believe.