Cat's Eyes & Best of 'Em 1993

Charles Bell made “Cat's Eyes & Best of 'Em” with a process that feels like meticulous layering of light, almost like glazing in oil paint. The painting is basically a playground of light and reflection, right? Look at how each marble has its own little halo, a pool of color cast onto the surface. And the surface itself! It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on there - the cool grey feels almost like a digital rendering, yet those hard edges must have been painstakingly rendered with an airbrush. The star of the show is, of course, the marble at the center, the largest one with all the swirling colors. You could get lost in that thing! Each little stripe and curve feels deliberate, but together they create this wild, chaotic energy. It makes me think of Vija Celmins' hyperrealist drawings, which achieve a similar effect through a different medium. The way light bounces around suggests that art is an ongoing conversation of ideas across time, a process of reinterpretation.