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Colour and Wonder

When viewed from a distance the surfaces of Duncan Bullen’s drawings seem to move like wind rippled grass, or tide sculpted sand, shivering with luminous energy as they tease the eye with forms and colours that constantly fall in and out of focus – their proffered haloes of iridescence defying our attempts to grasp them. But stand in the artist’s space – at arms length to the gesso surface – and these nebulous, intriguing effects disappear. In their place we are confronted by something more tangible and physical – grids and chequer boards of individually drawn dots that cover the subtly tinted gesso surface with a fine net of colour… Each has its own distinctive quality, … But, however fascinating and compelling these dots are, we are soon drawn to step back and find the tipping point of wonder where the physical mechanics of the work vanish into a midst of coloured light… these drawings are a contained space of wonder in which the mesh of coloured dots drag the ineffable, intangible presence of light into the physical reality of this world to playfully dance before our eyes.… Bullen’s drawings remind us, even when we have uncovered its mechanics and discovered its physical properties, colour still brings us back to wander in wonder and marvel in mystery. The coloured marks that activate these gesso surfaces generate instances of the insubstantial, the inexplicable, the mysterious.

Dr. Richard Davey,
Extract from ‘Figuring Light: Colour and the Intangible.

Colour Conversation

RD: Each dot has a real sense of energy, almost a personality.

DB: I see them as drawings and therefore works concerned with mark-making. What really interests me is the way that one constructs a veil of marks, that in turn creates a space where colour generates a field of light - a visual energy, a pulse, a vibration...

Extract from 'Figuring Light: Colour and the Intangible'
Click here to open full version.

Duncan Bullen’s collection ripples and merges; a series of canvases speckled with points which undulate before the eyes. The precision of their execution is reminiscent of George Seurat and the early-Impressionistic optical experiments in painting with contrasting and similar elements. Indeed, though their impact is far from overwhelming, you could easily imagine whiling away hours moving towards and away from the pieces and studying their effects in different lighting … in Figuring Light the elusive nature of colour is joyously indulged, from the impossible nature of Kenton-Webb’s task, to the infinite images which reside in just one of Bullen’s dizzying pieces.

Extract from a review of 'Figuring Light; Colour & the Intangible',
Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham Left Lion, Nottingham Culture, Laura Gavin

Duncan Bullen's series of paintings, pointillist points of paint and shapes such as chequer boards all express different shades of white, as if all road colours eventually lead to white, the blank intensity of the start or the end of the universe. Or am I getting carried away? …For emotional impact, it's Partridge's kaleidoscopic paintings and Bullen's clever, intellectual, canvasses which strike home most.

Extract from a review of 'Figuring Light; Colour & the Intangible',
Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham Evening Post / thisisnottingham.co.uk

Bullen’s paintings initially appear to be about the relationship between two, or at most three, colours interacting on the same plane. But a closer look reveals that they really operate in three dimensions with each painting built up from semi-transparent glazes of different colours. Laying one colour over another can result in a muddy gloup of congealed tone, but because these glazes are applied wet on to dry they remain distinct, each one able to respond to the others and to the luminous gesso ground that anchors them all. As a result Bullen’s surfaces shimmer with a sense of luminous energy as if they are about to give birth to a thousand miniature suns.

Richard Davey extract from Silence and Light Exhibition Catalogue Click here to open full version.

'The tiny surface manipulations and visual archaeology in Bullen’s work may record the passing of time, but as our eyes become trapped in the search for such intimate details time seems to stand still. Signs of activity become symbols for silence, stillness, and timelessness; a visual analogy for the sacred space of the Eremo do Santa Caterina… One of Bullen’s principal concerns in his work, however, is with capturing something of the elusive, fugitive effects of light. The natural vehicle for this is colour. He uses colours for their transparency and opacity, he plays with their relationships, manipulating and using the different effects that they have on each other, and he explores the intense energy that is released at the point where they meet each other. The result is a series of works that seem to have an iridescent, almost metallic sheen to them that both contains and reflects light…These are works of stillness and light. They are human and intimate. There are no grand gestures or bold narratives. They are not monumental and overwhelming. Instead they offer an analogy for that still small voice in which God can be found, or that initial burst of light that He brought into being. What they are not is abstract.'

Revd Richard Davey
For the record, not abstract (Extract)
Church Times April 2005

Artists Books

'Duncan Bullen’s Night Prayers, published in 2004, was conceived as one element of a residency and exhibition at the Eremo di Santa Caterina on the Italian island of Elba. Working in the sacristy, with no electric light, Bullen made a series of abstract paintings and densely shaded small works on paper. The book reproduces seven of these in relation to fragments of text by the 13th century Dominican monk – Meister Eckhart. Bullen uses simple forms that explore the metaphorical potential for abstraction. The under-surface of the drawings is worked with intense colours over which he places veils of black, through which squares and grids emerge like light. The fine litho printing by Andrew Purches of Senefelder Press, conveys Bullen’s barely perceptible tonal gradations. Meister Eckhart’s texts are lifted from their Christian context to become meditations upon processes of thought, or in this case, the attempt of the artist visually to express immanence and transcendence.'

Emma Hill
Printmaking Today – International Magazine of Contemporary Art.
Vol 15 No2 Summer 2006

For the last month Duncan Bullen’s subtle, peaceful abstract paintings have made the Star Gallery a calming haven for peace-loving Lewesians to collect their thoughts. They are going down on Sunday, so this weekend is your last chance to experience the meditative effect these works can have on you. The artist spends several weeks every year in Santa Caterina, a 16th century former hermitage on the island of Elba. His visits to this spiritually rich haven have been central to the development of his unique style. Bullen’s works, painted in oils and watercolours on wood and paper, are usually shaped as circles, squares, cruciform’s or quatrefoils. They seem to contain, in their subtle tonal gradations, a depth of spiritual power stored within their frames.

Viva Lewes Issue 15

In looking at the recent series of works by Duncan Bullen.As with the panels at Jordans, the light in the paintings emanates a silent but persuasive energy. Yet rather than emitting shafts of actual sunlight, the carefully painted canvasses are irradiated mostly by thin, vertical bands of light -coloured pigment, almost imperceptible close to, but which become more evident when looking from a distance. As with the effects of light on the wooden panelling, the pale bands or zips of colour seem to emerge from behind the flat surface.

ANNA MOSZYNSKA, Summer 2001
Dark Light exhibition catalogue,
Jill George Gallery, 2001. Click here to view full version

Lumen

The physical size of the work also acts to heighten a sense of preciousness. Like Icons they contain, to borrow a phrase from Gaston Bachelard an "intimate immensity" … the numinous effects generated by close tonal density and chromatic luminosity seem to radiate an immaterial glow, while the regularity and symmetry concentrate ones attention – like a ‘mandala’ they draw the eye toward the centre and may induce a state of mind that is contemplative. The light source within Bullen’s painting seems to be within the surface; the layers of transparent glaze act as a veil to produce an illusion of space and light.

Hans Georg Berger
Lumen. - exhibition catalogue (extract)
Eremo di Santa Caterina 1998.

Transformed by the Light

When standing close to Duncan Bullen’s oil paintings, they are seemingly just one colour. But when your eyes adjust, or when you stand back from them, definite but illusive marks of another tone become known. Either skeletal bands from the top to the bottom of the canvas or the four edges of what could define a cross shape present themselves. Bullen says of these meditative paintings:“ in recent years, I’ve tried to find what I would describe as a chromatic luminosity, where colour becomes an embodiment of light. I hope to achieve a balance where things are held in a kind of tension.
It was Bullen’s time as artist in residence at the Eremo di Santa Caterina, a small hermitage on the Italian island of Elba, that inspired such pictures. He returns to the same remote place once a year. The quiet, the lack of distraction and crucially, living and working by candlelight – because there is no electricity there – transformed Bullen’s art. Key to his vision was an awareness of how candlelight flickers and condenses space. These observations are a fitting explanation of the marks that, at a glance, can appear as fleeting shadows or dust that might be blown away .He explains: 'I aim to achieve an ambiguity with what’s there and what’s not there.- ” This ambiguity and Bullen’s desire to give the painting’s an aura of silence is subtly disarming. As he says: “I want to move towards a kind of silence, stillness and balance. Silence, on the one hand, can be tranquil and on the other, unnerving.'

Hattie Gordon
The Argus, Brighton. Friday, May 17 2002

An Island Vision

The Eremo di Santa Caterina in itself echoes a sense of place in history that sparks the sensations to the levels where colour, form and light become fused as one,… Bullen is concerned with the shifting pattern of colour and light, and the problems involved in recording a suspended moment in time. This is exemplified in a new group of four feet square paintings, which take this notion further and are constructed on the canvas in four, one foot squares of the same tonal colour, but blended from side to side and corner to corner, giving the illusion of pivoting from the centre, suggesting the animated movement of a Catherine wheel … Bullen is interested in the way colour emerges out of shadow,… his paintings drawings and prints are subtle, resonant and thoughtful, but above all, sensually arresting in spirit and presence.

William Jackson An Island Vision - exhibition catalogue (extract)
Loughborough University 1997