Charles Bell is a photorealist painter who received no formal art training, and maintained a successful artistic career between serving in the Navy and an accounting job. After moving from the west coast to New York in the late 1960s, Bell was inspired by the immense detail and study of everyday life that large photorealistic paintings offered. He would capture images of objects and scenes from city streets, and later utilize his oil painting skills to render them in full detail on a canvas. Bell’s paintings and prints often focus on everyday objects, consumer culture, and childhood. The works’ large scale and incredible detail makes the viewer focus on these common objects and scenes from a hyperrealistic and exaggerated perspective, creating a response that combines familiarity and sentimentality, and foreignness and wonder.
Charles Bell’s “Little Italy” is a large silkscreen print that captures a still life scene of an Italian-American corner store. In front of the shop door are gumball and toy machines, some of Bell’s favorite subjects, that provide a pop of color and a sense of childish whimsy to an otherwise common scene. It is not until closer inspection, or assessing the title, that the viewer notices that this is an Italian market, with imported goods and bilingual labels. The title, “Little Italy,” suggests that this store would be in a neighborhood inhabited by Italian immigrants. This piece is especially interesting to me because it reveals the beauty of the everyday, but purposefully highlights the immigrant in an image of American life. Bell depicts a red gumball machine, a classic American symbol of youth and playfulness, outside of a shop window with foreign words but familiar products, which strengthens the mix between nostalgia and disconnect that many photorealist works project. By combining imagery of both foreignness and familiarity, Bell portrays the extent that immigrants become part of American culture. The piece forces his audience to reflect on the positive impact that immigrant families, businesses, and communities have on everyday life in America, something that we should all appreciate more often.