Notes

Deborah Bell’s paintings and drawings of lovers in different positions of embrace, made during the mid-1980s, powerfully depict the anguish of desire and the struggle of wills. Typical of these works, in the present lot, The Lovers, the woman shifts and twists towards and away from the man, desiring consummation yet fearful of the intrusion. The Lovers touches on meanings similar to other paintings of lovers at the time, the woman is in a state of turmoil, passion and ambivalence expressed through the churning of the heavy drapery, her twisted clothing, the sense of being thrown off centre by the man’s resigned clasp. Set against a scarlet red backdrop, evoking both passion and violence, the woman seductively wears a sharply pointed red shoe, a recurring motif in Bell’s work. There is little tenderness between the man and woman. She seems reluctant, afraid of his power, but needing to lose herself in a desperate, all consuming passion. The figures are corporeal but sensuous: Bell evokes this sensuality through skilful manipulation of medium and colour to produce dramatic contrasts of coloured light and velvety shadow.

At the time, Bell described the feeling of claustrophobia that these paintings and drawings induce as ‘the claustrophobia I feel in this country’. This can be seen in the images of tightly enclosed, tilted interiors in which the characters remain trapped in their own, isolated worlds. Unable to exit the suffocating environment in which they have been created, to move into the outside world of political action, they seek comfort in empty, fearful embraces.

Bell says, ‘it is only in retrospect, in trying to work out what those spaces meant to me, that I think that there was an enormous amount of fear in those images, a fear of mortality’. ¹

¹ Pippa Stein (2004). Deborah Bell, Taxi 010, Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, pages 13 and 14.