“Do you sense how all the parts of a good picture are involved with each other, not just placed side by side?
Art is a creation for the eye and can only be hinted at with word.” —John Baldessari

Welcome to the website of Jerry Belland. I am a veteran artist who has been making and exhibiting art for nearly four decades. This site contains examples of work I’ve done over
the past ten to fifteen years. I have exhibited widely locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. My works hang in hundreds of collections both public and private.

My work draws on a number of influences:
• Medieval illuminated manuscripts
• The comic strip artists of the golden age of comics
• The Pop artists of the 60s and 70s (Rauschenberg, Claus Oldenburg)
• Commercial illustration of the 50s and 60s
• The surrealist art of Magritte and Delvaux
• American modernistic poets (Brautigan, Dylan, Ginsberg)

The Artist, Jerry Belland: I was born in 1947 on a farm in Southern Wisconsin. I received a B.S. degree in Art from the University of Wisconsin and a Masters Degree in art from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I have taught art at every level, elementary through college. I have been an associate at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside for the the past two years. At one time I made a reputation for myself as a poet. I see much of the work that I do as being poetry in visual form.

The Artist’s Vocabulary: Many of my paintings are in a series called “The Artist’s Vocabulary.” The expression came from Renee Magritte who claimed that every artist creates his own vocabulary. I have always been interested in subject matter in my work, so in my Artist’s Vocabulary works I set down many of these images together in the same piece. The image of St. James might share the same paper with a head of a bird, for instance. These works are tied together by color, placement, and all those illusive qualities that make something into art. Some of these paintings “fell together” with little effort, but many of them were worked on over a period of months.

Collage: Many people have told me that my work is painted collage. O.K. I have a great fondness for collage artists of the Modern Era. I acknowledge their influence. Sometimes I do separate little paintings that are “pasted on” with a thick layer of paint and modelling paste which gives the work that much more texture and depth.

Birds: At a recent exhibit a man came up to me and told me that birds were seen as the “messengers of the gods.” I do believe that bird images have an archetypal power to them. I am not a birdwatcher in the sense of someone who goes out with a pair of binoculars to hunt down various species. I am basically responding to their mystery.

Linoleum Cut/wash: A linoleum cut print is a piece of paper that has been printed off of a linoleum block. The linoleum block is a sheet of linoleum (thicker than the kitchen floor linoleum) that has been hand-carved to foam a relief. That relief is then printed. Think “grave stone rubbing” and you have the general idea. The print is made on a high-quality piece of heavy paper. Most of my prints are then hand-colored using diluted acrylic paint. I have found this to be the easiest way to achieve some of the subtle color blends that I want. This hand-coloring is referred to as a “wash.”

Leg Art refers to a commercial art generally seen in the 40s through 60s that used that feminine part as a point of interest and allure. Think pin-up. Leg Art was used to sell calendars, pulp book titles, record albums, and the like.

Illuminated Manuscript: I have always been fascinated by the hand-made illuminated manuscripts of the medieval era. It is a combination of words and pictures that lends itself to all kinds of creative solutions. In some of my “word” paintings, such as “Reading Ann Sexton,” I’ve made the words themselves into the subject matter of the art.