Bend has been thinking about abstraction since the early 1970s, developing his practice slowly and organically across five decades. His approach centers on a codified visual language — specific colors assigned to specific emotional states, recurring motifs deployed with consistent symbolic meaning — that allows abstract painting to function as genuine emotional narrative rather than pure aesthetic exercise. He is explicit about this commitment: without a narrative, abstract art is simply aesthetic art with no voice.

The color system is the structural foundation of everything. Pure cadmium red is used as an expression of love and passion, yellow for wholeness, stability, and the physical state of the self, and blue for the intellect and the mind. This is not an arbitrary assignment — Bend has built it through decades of use until it has become a fully internalized language, as second nature to him as words are to a writer. Once a viewer understands the grammar, the paintings reveal themselves with startling clarity. The density of red in Amore — Infinite Love — the largest work in the portfolio — is immediately legible as a statement about the overwhelming totality of unconditional love; the swirling vortical composition reinforces this, creating the sensation of being drawn in with no possibility of escape.

The End of Love operates as a devastating counterpoint to Amore. Where the earlier work was all centrifugal warmth, this is centrifugal dissolution: dissected shapes of muted reds and fading yellows, pierced by antagonistic orthogonal darts, divided by a monochromatic schism, and infested with small antagonistic cubic shapes that — in a conscious echo of Dalí's ants — represent slow decay. The conceptual precision here is striking: Bend has built a visual argument about the transition from love to indifference that is completely coherent without being illustrative.

The non-thematic oil paintings reveal the full breadth of this pictorial intelligence operating without the constraint of a named series. Composition 1 — Poetic Dance and Composition 2 demonstrate Bend's command of the visual grammar at its most exuberant: in Composition 1, primary geometric forms — triangles, circles, intersecting lines — collide and overlap against a field of saturated red and cool grey, the whole composition alive with what the title promises: rhythm, movement, dance. Question of Balance — Swinging introduces a more precarious energy, the composition tilted into deliberate instability, forms caught mid-motion. Confusion — WTF Going On? is among the most formally complex works in the portfolio — a dense interlocking of geometric and organic forms in yellow, grey, blue, and earth tones, the title's sardonic note introducing a rare strain of wit into the symbolic vocabulary. Push-Pull, a diptych on wood panels, uses the two-panel format to enact the tension its title names: two visual fields in productive opposition, each asserting and resisting the other simultaneously.

The Orpheus trilogy — spanning forty years from the original Orpheus (1985) through Eurydice (2020) and The Underworld of Hades — is the most ambitious work in the portfolio. Orpheus is rendered as bright, rhythmic, and dynamically primary — a musical form of radiating energy conveying strength and purpose. Eurydice is its muted, pallid echo, painted over a black wash in tones of low chromatic intensity that suggest death and distance. The Underworld of Hades uses heavy impasto and a complete removal of rhythm or order to create what Bend himself describes as a terrifying, disembodied image he finds himself repulsed by. That last admission — the artist unsettled by his own creation — is the mark of a work that has succeeded.

The States of Mind series brings the symbolic vocabulary to bear on psychological states with compact precision — and the pencil drawing series that accompanies it represents a distinct and equally accomplished body of work. Executed in graphite with considerable tonal sophistication, the drawings operate in their own register: Introvert/Reflection and Extrovert/Confidence are the paired anchors, depicting contrasting mental states of public engagement and private retreat with the same formal intelligence as the paintings but in a more intimate, immediate medium. Senility projects the isolation of diminished cognitive ability through increasingly fragmented forms. Agitation — emerging from a personal experience of head injury — introduces jagged directional energy entirely distinct from the more considered compositions. Nervous Breakdown, S of M: Vanity, and S of M(?) Conflicted extend the psychological mapping into territory that is progressively more interior and more uncomfortable. In all of these drawings, the pencil line — fine, precise, occasionally hatched into tonal depth — does what the color-coded oil paintings cannot: it records the nervous system at work, thought made visible in its most unmediated form.

The Autopictography — a polyptych of his entire life rendered in abstract form, organized within a single canvas in the manner of a Renaissance altarpiece, with Heaven above and Hell below — represents the most complete statement of his practice. It is an autobiography painted in a language that only this artist speaks, and it rewards the viewer who has learned the grammar.

From a Collector's Eye: Bend's work offers something genuinely distinctive in the landscape of contemporary abstraction: a fully developed private symbolic language, built across fifty years of sustained practice, that gives every work a depth of meaning that purely formal abstraction cannot achieve. These are paintings and drawings that invite repeated study — each new viewing, armed with greater understanding of the grammar, reveals more of what the work is actually saying. The range across the portfolio — from the intimate pencil drawings and small States of Mind panels to the monumental Amore — gives collectors real flexibility, and the thematic coherence of the body of work means that acquiring works across different series creates a genuine dialogue rather than an accumulation of unrelated objects. The drawings in particular represent an exceptional collecting opportunity: works of considerable formal accomplishment available at an accessible scale, carrying all the intellectual depth of the larger paintings in a more intimate and immediate form.

Despina Tunberg Curator
World Wide Art Books and Artavita
5533 Cathedral Oaks Rd, Santa Barbara, CA 93111, U.S.A., Tel / fax +1 805 770 5136