Dylan Bell

Dylan grew up and studied in New Zealand, where he created large ‘paste-up’ pieces and developed a love for the graphic qualities of photocopy, and screen-printing. He moved to Scotland and taught in the Lothians before leaning back towards developing his own practice. More recently his small batch, hand-produced pieces have gained a pop vibrancy, both in colour and imagery. Current works predominately use a variety of over-printing techniques with stencil blocked spray-paint as a base. Spraypaint is his number one medium, offering endless possibilities for creative layering, especially in conjunction with silkscreens. 

His collectable numbered editions (on paper), the stencilled and paste-up street art, and re-worked vintage one-offs that he produces cover a wide range of subject matter and themes. He uses images of well-known locations, architecture, nature, pop-culture, typography, street art, and vintage magazines/comics to make graphically hand cut pieces for his collectors, and the public. His works are easily recognised by the colour key in the margin, which show the individual colours used and number of layers that have been built up.

“My mind breaks everything into a series of block-layered colours. I enjoy focusing on the graphic geometries of images, their registry points, and look at all compositions as a series of colour strata. Collating, and playing around with; old postcards, vintage art, comics, and pop culture imagery, gives me a starting point for compositions, a place to drop my craft-knife into, old-school analogue hand-cut stencils”.