Nicki Bell is an artist of various mediums (collage, painting, and stained glass) and a classical pianist. She began lessons in art and music at the age of five and continued her education at UC Berkeley, where she received her undergraduate degree in Art History, and SUNY Stony Brook in New York. During her studies, she had the opportunity to study with many distinguished teachers and artists, including R. B. Kitaj and Malcolm Morley.

For a decade, Ms. Bell was a partner in Dasein Studios, an architectural glass studio with commissions scattered all over the country, including several windows showcased in a feature film starring Kim Novak and James Coburn. During these years she participated in several summer courses with German glass artist Ludwig Shaffrath, which enlarged her artistic vocabulary and redefined how she conceived of and used abstraction in her work.

Fifteen years ago she began working in collage as an extension of practice in glass. The collages on this website are part of a series germinating from a trip to the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts. The paper bag housing her purchased music “looked good enough to play and too good to throw away.” The collages incorporat handmade Japanese and European papers, as well as bark, string, and printed music. Her work has also been influenced by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Emile Nolde, Helen Frankinthaler, and Joan Mitchell.

Ms. Bell has always had one foot in the visual arts and the other in music. She has taught piano for thirty years and is an actively performing pianist, especially enthusiastic about two
piano repertoire and chamber music. Her collages are the visual complement to her love of music as a dynamic dance of line, color, shape, and texture, the tension between balance and off-balance finding a kind of resolution as in the weaving lines and harmony of classical chamber music.