A favorite word I first remember seeing in an artist's statement when attending a long-ago photography exhibit...a word Paula Wenzl Bellacera delighed in using when referring to her earliest fine art photography...she was still a Wenzl then...at a time when her art consisted primarily of photography-based work...
I loved the technique she would apply to polaroid film to give her images the ethereal quality of an impressionist painting...using pencil points, popsicle sticks or whatever other inventive thing she could imagine, Paula would manipulate each image while the reagents in the film were still unsettled...she created masterpieces from the pigments, acid neutralizers and light-blockers in the pool of development chemicals contained in the layers of the film...
Untitled work by Paula Wenzl (Bellacera)...
I was fortunate to acquire this piece from her...she said it was one of her earliest and a favorite...a piece she had hung in her bathroom...
Hearing that was the first time I had considered the idea that art belongs everywhere...and so now it hangs in my bathroom...where I see and appreciate it every day...where I can feel connected to Paula every day...where, to this day, I remain fascinated that she could take a photo of a dirt road beside the freeway and turn it into something so extraordinary...