AND THE MUSIC GOES ROUND AND ROUND

The Twist in Bea Mitchell’s Art

By Douglas Max Utter

Bea Mitchell has always been an artist in one way or another. She grew up making finely tuned connections between line and tone, color and love. A roundabout path brought her eventually to sculpture and to the playfully geometric, fast-moving abstract paintings for which she is known today – but by way of several other careers.

"In 1952, at age 20, I married," she says. "And I asked my husband Max about an ad I’d seen in the paper for a modeling agency and school. ’Do you think I could do that?’ I said to him. He told me to go downtown and get a contract, and he’d look it over." For the next 14 years she modeled, and after that did layout for an offset printer; she was even a stage actress for a little while.

But the real twist in her story began a long time afterward,when she graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1980. "It seemed to me that my life would be divided into different parts, "she says. "I questioned myself as I went along. I wondered if I was going in too many directions. It’s only now I’m able to see how it all comes together."

Mitchell traces her creative ambitions back to her father, who was a Cleveland billboard painter. Some of her earliest memories are of helping him mix paint or lay out the design of smaller signs. She learned so well that 40 years later, when she attended the Cleveland Institute of Art,she was given academic credit for her knowledge of color theory. Her dad was also a self-taught piano tuner, tinkering with an ancient Steinway baby grand, on which Mitchell played her lessons for many years.In the end,his daughter (who somehow found time among her other activities to study piano for a total of 19 years) would bring these two occupations together in works that are, among other things, a tribute to him.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Mitchell began making sculptures based on her fascination with topology, and especially the marvel known as a Möbius strip. A circular band,cut and reunited after being given a half-twist, a Möbius strip has only one, continuous surface – if you were to walk around it, you’d return to your starting place at the end of two complete circuits. It’s a model of infinity you can see and touch, at once plain and mathematically fancy. Mitchell’s lilting half-twist sculptures have a special grace and freedom. Constructed from materials as various as cast stainless steel, jute and found objects, they seem to fold subject matter and materials into themselves, suggesting melodic variations and recurring life themes. The eye links with, then sinks through Mitchell’s porous, seductively complicated surfaces.

One mid-size sculpture hangs in the dining area of her east side Cleveland home. Titled And the Music Goes Round and Round, it’s made of 10 rows of whole piano keys,each about one foot long,and black vacuum hose from an auto parts store threaded with sturdy brass wire. Pieces like this one and Always Tubing Tuning Pins closely resemble musical staffs translated into three dimensions, then flung over the shoulder of the space they occupy.

Among recent accomplishments, Mitchell was one of the three principal members of the Newcelle painting/drawing group, working with longtime CIA professor Ed Mieczkowski and the late John Jackson. Improvising their distinctive lines serially in large-scale works on paper,the three took turns as they created an extraordinary kind of visual jazz.

In the last few years, her life’s unusual topology has succeeded in circling the globe – her sculptures and paintings can be found in public collections from Cleveland and Chicago to Bangalore, India. Like her sculpture, Mitchell’s story is interrupted and mended by unexpected intersections of identity and purpose.

If you would like to see more of Bea Mitchell’s work, tune in to Applause, the award-winning weekly arts and culture series on WVIZ/PBS ideastream. Watch the episode that airs Thursday, February 7 at 7:30 p.m. and repeats Saturday, February 9 at 6:30 p.m. and again on Sunday, February 10 at 1 p.m.

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