Genesis Palette

"Genesis Palette" occupies a unique place in Marcus Bell's body of work — a painting that is simultaneously a document of his process and a finished work of art in its own right. The work is, literally, the working palette Marcus used over the course of creating his landmark "Motor City Resurrection" series — a large wooden board on which he mixed his paints during the eighteen months of that project's creation, its surface now carrying the accumulated physical record of every color decision, every mix and adjustment, every moment of creative energy and uncertainty that went into those monumental canvases.

The surface is a dense, layered landscape of paint — the warm reds, burnt siennas, and deep cobalts of the "Motor City" palette predominate, their surfaces mixed and scraped and re-applied in ridges and valleys of impasto that catch the light differently from every angle. Over this ground, fresh paint has been squeezed and allowed to fall and curl — vivid cyan blue in loose, looping forms like handwriting; sharp red in tight, urgent gestures; a long sweep of cadmium yellow cutting diagonally across the composition like a bolt of energy. A single dark, feather-like stroke of black runs through the center of the image, grounding the chromatic energy around it. The palette's surface is at once entirely abstract and entirely legible as the record of a working artist's mind — the physical trace of the thinking that produces art, the visible evidence of the process that is usually hidden behind finished surfaces. Marcus decided to document and sell this piece only after a studio visitor looked at the palette for a long time and told him it was the most honest painting in the room. He has since described the work as teaching him something important about where meaning actually lives in the making of art.