Meet the Artist: Arabella Proffer

By Kelli Comer

Cleveland-based painter Arabella Proffer isn’t one to let adversity slow her down or dampen her spirits. In the summer of 2020, a decade after she was first diagnosed, she found out that her cancer had returned and was deemed inoperable. She was given a prognosis of months, not years. If you take a look at her blog, ArtyFarty.blog, you will find her spirit, humor and honesty refreshing in spite of all she is facing.

After much of her career focusing on portraiture, Arabella made the transition to abstract, surrealist work. Inspired by science, medicine and illustrations of botany and microorganisms, Arabella says she is very into visionary artists like Raymond Jonson and Agnes Pelton, as well as the landscapes of Gainsborough and Bruegel.

“It was odd, one day I just decided I didn’t want to paint people anymore after over a decade of doing nothing but that,” Arabella explains. “I did three of these paintings with no direction and they sold immediately. I didn’t even know biomorphic art was a genre.”

Arabella’s series heavily relies on the alchemy of oil paint, and how it is used to dictate direction, shape aesthetic outcomes and transform emotional impressions.

“I think I began them the spring before my diagnosis. The tumor came quite fast, so the timing was too coincidental that I began them right as this thing was growing in my leg,” says Arabella. “After seeing the MRI, my tumor was a perfect oval set in my thigh with thin tentacles with tiny heads wandering throughout my leg. It struck me immediately that it all looked like exactly what I had done in my first painting.”

“Creating my own fragile beings and nature within these little worlds, alien forms mesh with what might be viewed under a microscope or through a telescope,” she notes.

“They are an artificial nature or a nature that is simply unknown to us, scientized and made more delectable. Perhaps it is a wider vision of awareness, of what is seen and unseen.”

To reach Arabella, you can email her at arabellaproffer@gmail.com. To learn more about the artist and her work, visit ArabellaProffer.com. To purchase her original work, visit ArabellaProffer.BigCartel.com.