Bella Foster: It was a Dark and Stormy Night

The Pit is delighted to present “It was a Dark and Stormy Night” a solo exhibition of paintings by California-based artist Bella Foster. In reference to Snoopy’s literary masterpiece, Foster titles her exhibition with a humorous poke at the often-mocked melodrama of purple prose, a literary style that Foster’s painting narratives deftly circumnavigate. In her interiors and exteriors, Foster evokes painting’s capacity to expand and contract time and space, rife with (auto)biography, culture, history, and myth. In the form of delicate luminescence, she employs European painting traditions in the service of transpersonal narratives.

Painted with the calm exactitude of a weaver, Foster’s paintings invite close investigation. We scour them for symbols and their connective tissues, meanings greater than the sum of their parts. This conveys something distinctive about Foster’s scouting mind and hand essential to all painters worth their salt, but it also suggests a network of rabbit-holes and allusions that await further exploration outside the frame.

For example, in many of her works she has depicted her friend’s spaces or her own. The objects in them are scaffolding for drawing and color (what Pierre Bonnard called the “logic and reason” of picture-making), but they are also symbols of desire and relics of experience. Taking “Shelley“, 2023, as a case study, we see her friend Tim and Mike’s living room, which features their dog, and things like their poster of The Smiths by Marc Hundley and their photo of Badlands, New York City by Gary Lee Boas. We also see a bust of Frankenstein’s monster, which is, among many things, a 19th century variation on the myth of Prometheus, a god who stole fire and gave it to humanity. Associations with our technological prowess and hubris ensue—as well as with Mary Shelley, Dr. Frankenstein’s creator, whose last name Tim and Mike’s dog coincidentally shares.

Such connections are funny or serendipitous or profound, depending on one’s point of view, but they consistently spring from Foster’s magnetism towards her subjects, all of which makes each painting a Transformational Object, in the words of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas; in other words, an environment that enables the self to be the subject of the artwork too. In this way, her paintings enable the intersubjective process to occur in defiance of geography and time, the latter of which is often in such short supply, suspended by the act of painting.

Another painting in the show, The Fox, 2023, arguably nutshells Foster’s preoccupations most succinctly. Having crossed paths with her on her daily walks, the elusive animal represents the allusive nature of her paintings, including the feminine, the supernatural, and the ability to shape shift. Her paintings animate the stillness of forms and meanings such that our hold on them becomes estranged despite our familiarity with their stylistic nods to Southern French traditions. Which is to say, the more we pursue their mysteries, the more they exist in psychic space. Such paintings not only validate our curiosity, but elevate quotidian objects and their surroundings beyond what we take for granted—another one of painting’s capacities integral to Foster’s vision.

- Max Malansky