THE INTIMATE STRUCTURE OF HIDDEN WORLDS, REVEALED Making art is like making soup. The artist puts together the ingredients - influences, experiences, sensibility - and lets them simmer and blend. If the chef is good, the result is a dish that is more than the sum of the individual flavors, a work with its own personality. So it is with Laura Bell's delicate paintings at Kiang Gallery. Soothing but spiced with imaginative wit, the intricate, linear forms floating in pale washes of color resonate with allusions from Chinese landscape painting to Dr. Seuss. But they add up to art that is distinctively, memorably, her own. You will find many of her "ingredients" taped to the walls of her tidy studio, the former back porch of the Adair Park home she shares with artist husband Matt Haffner and two energetic, mixed-breed dogs. The photos and postcards - an eclectic array including Persian miniatures, Renaissance frescoes, Moorish tile work, Japanese kimonos and an illustration from Beatrix Potter's "Peter Rabbit" - speak to her in different ways. Take the postcards of Chinese paintings. Their vertical-rectangular format is echoed in hers, as are their compositional devices. "I like to look at the way they are structured and balanced," says the Seattle native. "The way the images are distributed. There's a lot of negative space." Photos of the Alhambra, a castle in Spain, record the decorative richness of Moorish architecture. "It blew me away," she says. "Looking at those intense patterns over every surface brought home the meditative quality of the repeated mark." Art isn't her only source. When she feels stuck, she looks at a book of carnivorous plants and mushrooms. Books about cells lie on her table. "I'm fascinated by the idea of worlds that we can't see," she says, an interest that encompasses the microscopic and the undersea. Safely stored in her bookshelf is a tattered paperback of 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel's drawings. She discovered "Art Forms in Nature" by chance in graduate school when another artist left it in the studio. It was a lucky find: Haeckel's meticulous illustrations of the intricate patterns in nature are clearly a jumping-off point for Bell's fantastic organisms. This kind of imagery has occupied the 31-year-old artist since her student days and throughout her career as a printmaker. But the paintings represent a new direction, and she considers them a breakthrough. Bell was already feeling in a rut when the directors of Young Blood Gallery, an alternative space in Grant Park, asked her if she wanted to do a piece for their October skateboard art exhibit. Applying her imagery to the back of a wood skateboard was a eureka moment. "It was really exciting," she recalls. "I loved the immediacy of drawing directly on the wood. Painting allowed me to bring a lot of things together." Her new process starts with a wood panel, which she primes and paints in pale washes. She then inscribes it with circular and oval forms - and, more recently, fan and coolie-hat shapes - which she then complicates with additional shapes - tiny beads and dots. Think doily, paisley, protozoa. Bell works flat, on a table, focusing on one little section at a time. She works intuitively, just picking a place to start and going from there, and stands the panels up frequently to see the big picture. Liberating herself from the constraints of printmaking has sparked a period of creative energy. Bell is making more intricately patterned forms, and they now sprout tendrils that end in fictional flowers or creatures. "I'm letting myself give in to a certain kind of whimsical drawing that I had felt was related to illustration and not 'art' enough," she says. Bell likes to think of the imagery as mold, growing, creeping taking over, but the flora/fauna are too witty and vaguely Seussian to be scary and too elegant to be icky. Bell, who has not exhibited much since moving here five years ago, works to please herself. She says, "I've always loved art that unfolds, that is revealed more and more as you look at it, art that encourages an intimate relationship, like Persian miniatures." Now, with a major solo show under her belt, she is learning that viewers like it, too. "I saw people at the opening with their noses an inch away from the panels," she says. "I Ioved it." "Laura A. Bell: Accrescere." Through July 10; artist talk 3 p.m. July 11. Noon-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. $500-$3,600. Kiang Gallery, 1545 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-892-5477. - Catherine Fox Atlanta Journal-Constitution / 06.18.04