Sometimes, you discover an artist with such vision and talent, you're stunned every time you see their work. Such is the case with our Artist of the Month, Candace O Bell. A Toronto artist with a fine arts degree and a wide range of work, you'll be amazed at her talent, vision, colors, and creativity. Take a look...

The Four Elements

Please tell us about your art...

My current series is called Billions Pass Through this Landscape. It includes a cast of 27 characters (I’m working on the last 7 now), spanning all ages. The idea is to depict the whole life cycle. I take advantage of animal stereotypes and use them to stand in for various personality types. I’m not trying to dictate what characteristics each animal possesses or represents; rather, we can’t seem to help but bring our own education, past, and baggage along and put something of our experience into the characters. Thus a given character might be friend or foe to a viewer. With a non-human animal head plugged into a human body, we can’t help but interpret it in our own way, perceiving an easy-read for a personality type rather than an individual. This way I can show these 27 characters to all possess different personalities – to all be fulfilling different roles. I think that we take turns trying out all of these different stances, as our identity evolves. We’ve all been someone’s fox, and we’ve all been someone’s hare, at least somewhere along the way. So the idea of the whole series is to illustrate the life cycle; it can be read as a community, yes, but I think of it as a process that we each go through: there’s a start point, an end point, a whole lot of learning and growing and changing in between, and who knows, then maybe we get to do it again.

How/when did you start becoming an artist?

I don’t remember there being any defining point when I was inspired to pursue art, or making a decision to follow this path. I simply always loved to draw, and never stopped. It’s always seemed like the simple, obvious, natural thing to do. My itchy need to create, and my love for creating, feels inevitable and effortless. I never even thought to stop and think about it; I’ve just always been that quiet kid in the corner with a pencil crayon and paper scraps.

What do you draw inspiration from?

Geez, it’s almost embarrassing but the most obvious answers to this question sounds so hokey… Life! Hah. But really, that’s what I’ve been drawing and celebrating for years in different ways. When I was studying art at school, I created a series called Dis/Connect that was really a different way of saying the same thing. Though not intentional, I typically look back and find these big-picture themes in my work. So the curious challenge of understanding life and refining my place in it, and how I choose to move through it, is a prominent theme and inspiration for my art. Another big inspiration for me is the beauty of nature, which is another oft-cited answer that is nonetheless a hefty and important one, and perhaps even inescapable as an artist. Finding hidden colours in the up-close details of nature gets my mind bubbling.

I draw inspiration from dreams as well, from energies, from other artists – seeing the products of others’ creativity generates more creativity, and it sometimes makes my heart feel like it’s going to explode. …It’s a good thing.

Where are your favorite places to create art?

I love and seek out the small, solitary places – the quiet nooks and crannies where one knows one’s shoulder is safe from being looked over; where inhibitions pour away like water and, with no one to please but oneself, creativity unsticks itself from any stagnancies it may have been stuck in, and flows and dances and becomes charged with crazy electricity until the whole body dances with it and madness is a smiling friend who marks up your dance card.

I work alone in personal spaces – my home, my studio – where I can forget the world, forget myself, and where it feels safe to be irrevocably drunk on colour and texture and form. Spinning, grinning, happy drunk.

What do you enjoy creating most?

I mostly enjoy creating representations of organic forms – the nuances of light and shadow and the colours that emerge from these like Mama Earth Magic. I draw a lot of animals, human and otherwise, and can get lost in the quest to translate the soft surfaces of a body into colour. It’s the details I love – not that my work is terribly detailed; I’m a bit loose in my style, but I want to draw the creatures of Earth and, insofar as composition goes, have little interest in “background”; if I were interested in a piece of the landscape in the background, I would draw or paint that up close. I enjoy the potential of white space and prefer to leave the context of my characters up to the imagination. They can be everywhere; they can be nowhere.

How can readers find and purchase your art?

Please visit my website: madrabbitart.com

The website is also your best bet to find out about upcoming exhibitions. If you are interested in knowing about such things, please sign up for my mailing list as well, here.

All images shown here (excluding the feature photo) are available for sale. To purchase, please be in contact with me directly (candace[at]madrabbitart.com).

You can find me online at

Facebook: madrabbitart
Twitter: @MadRabbitArt

Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?

In addition to the series shown here, I’ve been playing with watercolours more lately, and so to see other things I’m doing, please visit my website.

Thanks for reading – I think you’re real swell.

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All photos courtesy and copyright Candace O Bell

Feature photo: The Thinker