Duncan Bullen

Duncan Bullen makes paintings that radiate an interior luminosity and stillness. His work is concerned with colour at the edge of its manifestation, colour as light and dark, dark moving toward light, day moving toward night. Attentive looking will reveal shadowed colour, an emerging form or an inner void. One will encounter a surface that has been articulated in such a way as to create a perceptual pulse, a composed expansion and contraction. Anna Moszyanska wrote of Bullen’s work ‘… these beautiful if fugitive images, create an unmistakable aura of quietness or even silence. If anything, they evoke the paradoxical description of "a white light still and moving" in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, and the later telling phrase, "at the still point, there the dance is".

Bullen graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1991 with a Prix di Rome. After completing this scholarship at the British School he went onto be artist in residence at the Eremo di Santa Caterina, a small hermitage on the Italian Island of Elba. Since then he has returned several times to this remote spot which has been formative in shaping the contemplative search that his painting offers. He has had many solo exhibitions, the most recent being ‘Silence and Light’ in 2006, at the Otter Gallery, University of Chichester, which followed a residency at the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Pennsylvania. His work is in many collections, both in this country and abroad. He lives and works in Brighton.