The Howl and the Whisper
Painting The Terror in Two Voices
After Postcard from Cannes, (from my last news-blog) I didn’t expect to find myself heading for the Arctic.
But the next work in this evolving series led me somewhere colder - conceptually and historically. Postcard from The Terror is a companion piece to my large abstract painting The Terror (2024). If that painting is expansive, emotional, and open-ended like a howl in paint, then this one is the forensic counterpart: cool, archival, precise.
It assembles fragments of research and speculation: a faux postcard of the ship The Terror trapped in Artic ice; a portrait of Sir John Franklin; a stylised map of the Arctic search zone; a reproduction of a reward poster issued by the British Navy; and an original abstract miniature. I also added two painted Post-it notes with one sketching a rough timeline, the other scrawled with theories about lead poisoning from tinned meat. To be sure: it’s all rendered in paint and ink, including the wood effect surface.
There’s something uneasy about the composition. Everything seems taped down a little too quickly, like notes hastily arranged. Perhaps theres’s a sense of urgency - an urgency which was absent in the British Admiralty at the time. While doing all the research and meticulous painting, I kept thinking of myself as both an investigator and a forger, not in the criminal sense, but in the older sense: someone who forges meaning through careful replication.
At one point, I worried that I was over-explaining The Terror by turning its ambiguous emotional field into a series of footnotes. But over time, I began to see the relationship differently. This painting doesn’t explain. It converses. It complicates.
If The Terror is the howl, Postcard from The Terror is the whisper.
If you’re interested in the history of paintings like this, look up the American artist William Harnett. His Artist’s Letter Rack (1879) is a masterclass in illusion with envelopes, cards, and clippings painted with meticulous precision. Traditional paintings like his tend to revel in surface deception, but I’m more interested in how they can operate as visual dossiers: fragments of evidence, composite memories, and quiet proclamations from the edge of history - coming together to tell a story.
Now in progress is the third in the series:
📮 Postcard from Windscale - a response to my large abstract Toxic Legacy (2025), exploring nuclear secrecy, environmental harm, and the lingering half-lives of state cover-up. I’m aiming to have it finished for my solo show in Sanremo later this year, once the summer heat fades.
Postcard from The Terror (2025) is 41 x 30 cm, made with acrylic paint and ink on canvas, mounted on a custom laminated poplar panel. If you’re interested in seeing more of my paintings, pop over to my website…
About me
My name is David Bell and I’m an artist living in Sanremo, Italy. I write this blog for my band of supporters, giving an insight to my art and life living on the beautiful Riviera of Flowers.