About Bella

Bella McGoldrick is an Australian/Kiwi artist that has been living in New York and Colorado for the last 6 years. She’s currently working from Costa Rica but it’s hard to keep up with her location at times, next month it's Mexico. Bella pulls inspiration from her surroundings, encouraging her to continually change them.

She started drawing as her full-time gig whilst living in Chinatown, Manhattan as can be identified by a lot of her subjects and artworks from 2018-2020, where she was playing with the iconography of the lesser esteemed but well-known objects that may litter the NYC streets where she lived. Road-tripping around the US in an RV welcomed her to the troves of the American pawn and antique shops which introduced the nostalgic and 'beat up' aspects to her work. 

Her realism works on paper are made up of dynamic and curated subject matter, usually floating in the white space, reflecting used and pre-adored objects. She uses colored pencils to create these works, often taking the artist up to 200 hours per piece, that can at first appear photographic, but she hopes can then translate the hand that they were drawn with to present the hand the objects have been held with.

By playing with scale and composition, these items to which McGoldrick finesse over enable her subjects to take demand the walls to which they’re hung. A depth is created where there was just white space, and the stories of these previously loved and handled objects leave the viewer to question “Whom did they belong to?” Bella's intention with her work is first to present the subjects to which she's had a connection. Secondly and perhaps more importantly to then hopefully bring a connection between those subjects and the viewer - take them back to a place, to a time, to a taste.

Bella operates from Australia under, Looks Pretty Good Pty Ltd