Light may be electromagnetic radiation traveling through space, but Seattle-based artist Deborah Bell makes poetry out of its physics. She studies the luminous energy for everything it reveals: color and emotions, transience and energy.

"My personal Northwest palette is red and orange and yellow and pink. Because in this beautiful wet world of blue and green and gray, those are the colors for which our eyes are always hungry."

"On rainy days," she says, "you really long to see a yellow slicker or the scarlet glow of neon in Pike Place Market. Or even the bright blue body of a cargo ship in Puget Sound."

Bell makes her art in a sprawling, shared studio next to an ancient ship canal; outside, a bright-red train rumbles by occasionally. Inside, the north light bounces off her walls. "It's a really wonderful light, bright but diffuse. The kind I associate with Holland or the Skagit Valley." This artist feels her regional surroundings have a special qualities. "Here there is something almost glamorous about nature."

Bell describes herself as a seasonal painter, but that word embodies changes she deliberately cultivates. "Variety is what I love in every aspect of my life. I crave variety where I walk, in what I eat, even in the music I play."

This curiosity also underwrites the scope of her art. "I drink pink lemonade; I eat both tofu and tarte tatin. I'm very lucky because I can talk with a cinematographer, but I have other friends whose greatest love is gardening. I listen to Stephane Graphelli but also Patti Smith or Chet Baker."

Her work interprets an inner world using the language of outward existence. "My art is how I think about who we are in this world; it's my own version of trying to make the invisible visible."