Artist pairs up paintings with shops

Princeton Shopping Center becomes an outdoor gallery

By: Rachel Silverman
   If Victoria Bell has a muse, it’s psychology, and her children.
   Both themes figure prominently in the artist’s whimsical work, the most recent example of which is on display at the Princeton Shopping Center.
   The shopping center installation features 60 black-and-white paintings of household items, each one corresponding with a specific store in the complex. A hammer represents Smith’s Ace Hardware, for example, a picnic basket Bon Appetit and a grocery bag McCaffrey’s market. A few interspersed panels show colored roses, meant to symbolize the center’s abundant greenery. The installation, which took a month to complete, decorates an awning structure along the perimeter of the center.
   Ms. Bell said her inspiration for the project came, in part, from her four young children.
   "I want them to see that if you want something, it can go up in the world," she said. "You can dream something so crazy and make it happen."
   Using her creativity — and her paintbrush — Ms. Bell managed to work all four youngsters into the images.
   Eight-year-old Victor dons a panel for Chestnut Tree Books, in which he is reading under a tree. The Image Arts panel features a framed portrait of Ms. Bell’s 6-year-old daughter, Alexandra. And the Eckerd drugstore piece, which is meant to represent the store’s photo development center, shows Santa holding two kids on his lap — 4-year-old Viva and 1½-year-old Evan.
   In lieu of accepting any of kind of payment, Ms. Bell asked the shopping center to donate her commission to Littlebrook Elementary School. In the end, center management wrote a $900 check to her children’s school.
   A self-described "psychological painter" Ms. Bell also relies on her background in psychology — she holds a bachelor’s degree and doctorate in the subject — to guide her art.
   She called the shopping center project, for example, an exercise in brain behavior and memory processes.
   "They’re simple images that just spark in your mind, that make you say, ‘Oh, you can buy shoes at the shopping center,’" Ms. Bell explained. "You look and see something you might not think you’d be able to buy at the shopping center, and then you learn you could."
   Ms. Bell’s other work is similarly driven.
   A children’s book called "Dream Painters: A Story of Hope," a project which Ms. Bell is now immersed in, allows the artist to explore the psychological principles of possibility and hope.
   The book is also, however, a tribute to Ms. Bell’s other love — her children.
   "Every mother wants to write a children’s book," she said. "My kids love to read it and make lots of suggestions."
   In addition to the book, Ms. Bell is responsible for two murals in Littlebrook Elementary School — images of trees on classroom doors — and plans to do two more. She’s crafted a mural in Pizza Star, and hopes to do another — of Princeton Township and it’s Italian sister city Pettoranello — alongside McCaffrey’s.
   "Every time I see a blank white space I think there ought to be a picture there," Ms. Bell added, chuckling.