For six years Larry Bell has been pursuing the manufacture of bronze sculplure, and seven examples from his 24-piece "Sumer Series" are now on display at the Dartmouth Street Gallery. The show Includes "Sumer #17," an elegant and fluidly designed life-size standing sculpture that Is one of-my favorites. The undulating lines and smoothly rounded forms animate the sculpture and imbue it with the energy of a dancer. The nearly 6-foot height makes it a familiar and friendly image. During my visit, gallery registrar Mary Kirschner stood under the right arm of "Sumer #17" to illustrate the sculpture's accessibility and humanity.

Connections between the "Sumer" figures and Bell's larger body of purely abstract work is rather tenuos. All that solidly connects these latest pieces with Bell's prodigious production of everything from glass sculptures, fountains, paintings and furniture to electronic board games is his experimental investigative imagination and his willingness to hire experts to complete his projects.

The artist began his career in 1959 with large geometric abstract paintings based on the rectangle and cube that were inspired in part by his studies with Robert Irwin at the Chouinard Art Institute.

During his early financial struggles as an independent studio artist, Bell worked as a regular bouncer and occasional 12-string guitarist at the Unicorn, a folk music night club in Los Angeles. He also worked in a picture framing shop.

In the back room between framing projects Bell began his research into the effects, of light on transparent, translucent and opaque surfaces.

Those experiments with cracked glass and shadow boxes led to his famous viewer interactive cube sculptures that captured light and atmospheric effects. Bell's Development of these ideas were so rapid that he startled the usually complacent and self-absorbed big market art scenes in Los Angeles and New York.

By his middle 20s Bell was ensconced in the New York jet set and well on his way to international stardom. Bell's face is part of the crowd on the Beatles "'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", album cover.

His early cubes required high tech surface coating techniques that Bell could not accomplish in his simply-equipped studio. So he commissioned experts to coat his Glass.

An accident during shipping required Bell to quickly locate a glass-coating outfit in New York to repair a damaged cube. The experts asked Bell why he wasn't making the glass panels himself, the answer to that question led to the establishment of a studio In New York and the acquisition of glass-coating equipment. From those faltering first steps, Bell became one of the world's foremost experts in coating techniques. He once said, that he could gold-plate a bowl of cottage cheese.

Bell's Sumer figures are a result of playful experiments with a laptop computer drawing program. In a sense Bell's drawings are connected with his glass sculptures through the silica sand to make both glass and computer chips. Computers have been called boxes of smart sand. Bell's sand box play has produced hundreds of small stick-figure that can be related to oriental calligraphy.

Architect Frank Gehry saw Bell's figure drawings while the two were working together on an architectural project. Ghery asked Bell whether the drawings could be made real somehow. With the cooperation of several studio assistants and foundry worker Alex Barret, who fabricated all 24 master maquettes, Bell was able to replicate the form and spontaneous quality of the computer drawings while translating them into three-dimensional bronze. A coincidence placed the "Epic of Gilgamesh" at Bell's disposal. He Immediately saw a connect ion between the trial's of Gilgamesh, ancient Sumerian culture, cuneiform writing and his own stickmen.

Bell wrote a fictional history of an ancient Sumerian city that required the presence of a watcher who oversaw public recreational and dance functions and an observer who oversaw the actions of the watcher. The observer and the watcher were seen as cultural shadows that kept the populace honest, The clandestine observer made sure that the watcher did his job of maintaining the integrity of the public rituals.

Sumer #12 is a seated stickman who was assigned the role of the watcher in Bell's fiction. The observer was played by Sumer #1 a slightly crouched standing figure. Those same sctilplures were commissioned in monumental size by Insurance executive Peter Lewis were exhibited in New York and at the Albuquerque Museum before being permanently installed on Lewis' company grounds in the Midwest.

When Sumer #12 was installed at the Albuquerque Museum during Bell's 1997 "Zones of experience" retrospective, museum director James Moore noticed n strong similarity between the sculpture and a Bell photographic self-portrait taken in 1968.

The photograph is of Bell's shadow cast upon the Venice Beach boardwalk. Bell is seated in exactly the same position as "Sumer #12.

Bell is an intuitive artist who constantly revisits his early work to make sure that he didn't miss an opportunity to further exploration and development of an idea. Bell never made a conscious connection between that early self-portrait and his later computer drawings, but Moore did make a valid observation.

Bell is involved in a continuous process of reinventing himself. He stays tuned in to a swirling vortex of ideas, concepts, visions, day-dreams, intuitions, mistakes, giant steps and earth awareness from which he pulls snippets of information. These snippets manifest works of art that are never quite complete. They remain fractions of a greater whole that is always beckoning Bell to keep producing. Somewhere inside the vortex Bell pulls back and observes himself as the watcher, who according to Bell's own myths is severely punished if he doesn't do his job. Everything that Bell does is a part of a gigantic internal self-portrait that may never be finished.

One Santa Fe critic dismissed Bell's Sumer figures as silly self-indulgences. I disagree because all of Bellšs work is deceptively simple. Einsteinšs formula E=MC2 is simple but profoundly equates energy and matter.

The speed of light is part of Einstein's equation, Bell pursues the behavior of light. His simplicity whether trapped inside a mirrored cube, large plate-glass sculpture or interference color canvas, questions human perception. Bell is, at once, an illusionist and a visionary who confounds the viewer beautiful craft and other feats of legerdemain.

Bell's stick people come alive like highly abstracted Saturday cartoons that run, skip, cry out and drag each other across the ground. Bell is definitely indulging his muse while amusing himself and the rest of us, However, like the Wizard of Oz even the map behind, the curtain can teach us to follow our hearts, use our brains and trust our instincts. Bell makes art to appease the dreamers among us.

Don't miss these pieces of Bell's enigmatic puzzle. The Bell toils for the and me. He is one of 20th century America's most underrated artists.