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Meet Glen Bellamy The Artist.
As a child, Glen Bellamy made a habit of sneaking out in the middle of the night – exchanging the noise of the city and the suburban neighborhoods where he grew up for the sublime silence and primal isolation of the outdoors. Things haven’t changed much – he does the same thing to this day. There’s something to be said for old habits.
It’s fair to say that those early escapes are where he found his artistic voice, before he even knew he was an artist. What grew out of them, or rather grew out of him, is a resonant style of landscape that disturbs the balance between what we see and what we feel. His work may feel like a photograph, a memory, or a sidelong glance through a window. His is an aesthetic built on moody, ambiguous, yet naturalistic colors, subtle anachronisms, and a pervading sense of, in the artist’s own words, quiet.
His style, technique and subject matter has shifted and progressed over the years, but that quiet has been something of a constant.
Not that it’s necessarily tranquil, per se. In fact, when considered closely, as he himself admitted, his images can be seen as “quite mysterious . . . maybe even a little frightening.” But whatever feelings any given piece may evoke – peace and quiet or ominous dread – atmosphere itself seems to be the dominant theme. Mood itself. Which is perfectly fine with Bellamy, who confesses only to expressing the world as he sees it.
Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, he grew up surrounded by plenty of open spaces – glimpses of which one might see frequently in his landscapes. He has since lived all over the map, from Oregon to Germany, from Southern California to the Carolinas. His work isn’t definitively regional, but more a cocktail of visual influences – places visited, moments remembered, scenes concocted. When working, he spends as much time outdoors – studying, researching, sketching out ideas and germs of ideas – as indoors in his studio. Unabashed in his preference for the outdoors in almost any circumstance, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Bellamy spent much of his early career as a wildlife artist, during which time one of his paintings was used as cover art for the postapocalyptic Orson Scott Card novel The Folk of the Fringe. Since then, his style has evolved and his preoccupations changed. So, too, has his choice of medium. Having worked extensively with oils, pencil, water colors, casein and especially acrylic, he eventually found his way to egg tempera, which is his current medium of choice and the medium in which he expects to remain. He was first introduced to tempera painting in an experimental art class many years ago, and was hooked immediately.
“Acrylic was quite good, but the more I painted with it, the more qualities I found that it lacked,” he says. “But [tempera], and the way it behaved, felt natural to me.”
While some artists resist the temperamental (no pun intended) nature of the medium, Bellamy has done quite the opposite. Tempera has forced him to mix and experiment constantly to find the exact colors he needs, which he cites as a benefit of the medium. Essentially, it becomes its own creative struggle. “It doesn’t just do what you want it to do - you have to figure it out,” he says. “You have to figure it out and then you’ve got to learn how to work with it.”
Bellamy studied art and art history at the Art Center in Pasadena, California and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He resides in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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