Wayne J. Bell, Jr.

Crosshatching is my approach to abstraction. It was conceived through my extensive practice in drawing and sketching growing up. It involves intersecting lines to produce shading and depth. The movement translates in painting with a multidirectional application of overlapping brush strokes with rigid edges. Because of this process, the striations manipulate light with elements of texture, perspective, and the color theory tonal spectrum.

The gestural immediacy of painting drives me in process, but the patience that is required in curing, and drying is when the work is truly being produced. I walk laps around the canvases as all the works are composed parallel to the floor, either on two-foot horses, or 2-inch wooden bricks. This allows for an honest act of deliberate marking and observing.

The work is characterized by a term I’ve dubbed “Atmospherism” as space, time, and setting are the most influential components of the developmental process. The strokes present in the paintings create ethereal properties that interact with direct and indirect lighting.

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My philosophy lies in the vocabulary of abstract expressionism, mastering my signature method of crosshatching to approach a degree of the surrealism that aims to revolutionize the human experience. Atmospherism is an intuitive, unrealistic, and even extreme style of painting that examines the otherworldly through the abandonment of conventional methods of illustrating unstructured space. 

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Recently, my method has evolved, including a scraping technique I called my Baroque period that parallels the nondeterministic layers of brush strokes created by crosshatching. It provides a much thicker, raised impression. These marks create strong borders and wide separations throughout the work and while they don’t blend in the same fashion, they do produce a multilayered visual field. It’s like performing surgery with a broad sword as opposed to a scalpel.

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These methods elicit emotion in abstraction through a violent practice displaying form with spontaneity and color blocking. The scarring and scraping of the paint create colorful, obstructive skeins through rigorous overlapping of concentrated oil paint washes.