Drawing on Revolution Painter: At one time J. Boyer Bell gave up art. Or tried to. Although he's remained a scholar and writer, he's also continued to paint.

NEW YORK -- One of J. Boyer Bell's four daughters once asked him: "Daddy, can't you paint a cow, or a bird?"

So he bought a small stuffed bird, glued it to the upper right hand corner of a large canvas, and painted it the color of a lark.

"See," he said, "I can paint a bird!"

There is no record that the child was satisfied. But Bell was, because the bird formed part of a larger message: a picture titled "Bobby Sands at the Maze."

For Sands, the Irish Republican Army gunman who died in 1981 after 65 days on hunger strike in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison, the lark symbolized freedom. He put it into his poetry.

Bell did not know Sands personally, but he has known many men and women like him in Ireland and other troubled places. In fact, he's written books about them. He still goes out now and then, blindfolded, to secret meetings with terrorists in hayfields.

The Bobby Sands picture, and the hundreds of others stacked in his Upper West Side apartment, reflect Bell's decades-long study of war and revolution. He has history paintings: small and precise abstractions and collages, with such titles as "War 1918," "Goodbye Vienna 1938," referring to the Anschluss between Hitler's Germany and Austria; "Lion," of Ethiopia; it shows the face of the late emperor, Haile Selassie.

And he has what might be called political paintings, like that of "Bobby Sands at the Maze." In addition to the pseudo lark, there are two photographs of Sands on the canvas. The rest is a broad, silvery field divided by blocks of darker paint. It suggests the H-shape of the Maze cellblock, where IRA prisoners are held in the British prison.

It is nonrepresentational art. Bell, who was formally trained, has always preferred the abstract. He would not even step out of it to appease his child.

Bell began painting with an ice teaspoon and a can of enamel before Jackson Pollock got rich at it. The art became a compulsion. But then one day, troubled by the practicality of trying to paint for a living, he stopped. Or started to stop.

It took a while, but Bell finally succeeded in euthanizing the artist within. Or so he thought.

Bell is 64. His long, curving nose, saucer-shaped glasses give him an avian look. He wears ersatz elephant's hair bracelets on his right wrist and has a jokey but pointed way of expressing himself. His conversation is pitted by a nervous cough.

Bell is one of those people who faced a conflict early on between the desires and necessities of his life, and made the usual choice. It went like this:

"In 1953, I graduated from Washington and Lee University. I decided I wanted to be a painter. My favorite painter at the time was a man called Franz Kline. He was on welfare. This told me something."

So he got a doctorate in history.

Try as he might, he wasn't able to stifle his need to paint. Even after getting a Ph.D. at Duke, and spending a year studying in Europe, the prospect of an academic career failed to light him up. So when he returned to New York in 1957, he got a job teaching in a prep school and continued to paint.

Paint or eat

But then, the painful choice reasserted itself: paint and starve (this was almost certain because he was out of sympathy with the prevailing rage for minimalism, and he had gotten married), or get a real job and eat.

You see, J. Boyer Bell ("Bow" to everyone who knows him) didn't believe in weekend painting. You either make art all the time, or not at all. No half measures for him. So the brushes went into the closet, and Bell headed for the campus.

Being a man with unconventional intellectual interests, however, avoided the usual career course. Not for him the life of an assistant professor writing recondite books, defending his century at faculty sherries, moving ever closer toward the somnolent sinecure of tenure.

Bell developed an interest in revolutionary movements: like the Mau Mau in Kenya and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He wrote a book called "The Besieged," about sieges in seven different cities. He met with people formerly of the Irgun, the violent Jewish underground that encouraged the British to depart Palestine by blowing up a lot of them. He got grants and non-faculty positions at universities, like MIT and Columbia. He operated out of his rambling apartment, chock-full of books and artifacts, African sculptures and paintings.

Harvard hired him to study the groups that fought the British in wasted corners of their empire. He moved his family to London, commuted back and forth to Africa. As he worked, his interest intensified in the people who fought and directed the underground wars. The soldiers of shadowy ranks, gunmen, bombers, terrorists committed to direct violent action, became his acquaintances. He went to places tourists avoided: Aden, Eritrea, Mozambique.

He determined, much to the dismay of living-room romancers of revolution, that guerrilla movements were largely ineffective. He made that point in his 1970 book, "The Myth of the Guerrilla." They came and they went, history's transients.