Painter makes her great escape

Published 6:00 pm Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Gillian Bull travels the globe in pursuit of light and color.

With the winter months stretching ahead like a drear expanse of soggy field, the prescription for fighting off both island and cabin fever might just be “The Great Escape.”

The Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery’s group exhibition features bright images of faraway places. For island painter Gillian Bull, who shows both pastels and paintings, creating those works is another ticket off “the rock.”

“The ultimate escape is just painting, itself,” she said, “and it’s been so interesting, because (all the artists) have a different vision of their escape.”

Bull shows drawings and oil paintings in places as far-flung as Portugal, Turkey, India and Antarctica, a site she returned to three times with her glaciologist husband.

She is willing to go to some lengths to follow the sun; preparations to work on location in foreign climes may take a daunting amount of planning.

“The joys and sorrows of painting outside are one and the same,” Bull said. “How much material do you bring? How do you transport it to the site? I’ve done everything from backpacks to wheeled bags.”

Choosing the subject also poses problems. Bull says she can arbitrarily pick a spot on which to spin 360 degrees and find “100 paintings.”

“The challenge is what to leave in and what to take out,” she said.

She favors scenes drenched in color.

“I really like sun,” she said. “I really want shadows. When it’s overcast you lose the brilliance of the color and I really like color.”

But to work outside, Bull’s palette and the canvas must be kept in the same diffuse light – not in full sunlight, which bleaches the colors, and not in shadow, which dulls them.

“You can’t have the sun glaring straight onto the canvas and if you turn it round it’s too dark, so you really need an umbrella,” she said.

How to affix an umbrella to the light, traveling easel she favors is a puzzle Bull hasn’t yet solved, she admits.

When she begins a composition, Bull looks first for the shadows and then for the shapes. But the changing quality of the light proscribes sessions lasting longer than an hour and a half.

“It’s exciting because you have to learn to work fast,” she said.

Especially on site in Antarctica, where the weather could be challenging. She sometimes painted in huts used for the scientists, or in abandoned whaling huts.

“We had huge amounts of driving, horizontal snow there,” Bull said.

She has also worked outdoors in less isolated venues, painting with a group in Mazama in eastern Washington.

“I like to paint with other people,” she said. “It’s exciting to see what others do with the same scene.

“And if your painting has problems, you get instant feedback.”

Comments from casual observers are a mixed bag, but often amusing. A car full of teens once did a quick U-turn to take another look and yelled “Go, Rembrandt, go!” as they streaked off.

Language barriers may not preclude communication; in Turkey, a woman wordlessly spread a beautiful rug outside her home and served Bull tea.

Not all interaction is positive, Bull admits; in Portugal, a thief broke into her car and stole supplies and easel, but left the paintings intact – a decision that left her mildly bemused.

Her career has spanned media as well as continents. She graduated from Bournemouth College of Art in England but gravitated later to fiber arts.

She came of age as an artist in the 1950s, the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. The period was dominated by male artists doing “action painting,” a technique lubricated as much by machismo as it was by paint.

The times were tough on female artists, and Bull recalls the ethos of the era when she hid her engagement to her now-husband, Colin Bull, from her professors.

“I knew that if my professors knew, that would be the end of the interest in me as a student,” she said. “They would say, ‘oh, she’s just going to get married, don’t bother with her.’”

The couple moved to New Zealand in 1956, and relocated to Ohio five years later. There, in 1968, Gillian Bull pursued a master of fine arts degree in weaving and fiber techniques.

For the next three decades, she would turn her visual talent to weaving, knitting and selling clothing. She only returned to painting in 1994, eight years after coming to Bainbridge.

While painting indoors is easier – and Bull admits she is more inclined these days not to venture outdoors in bad weather – the pursuit still appeals.

She currently has her eye on Crete.

“I don’t want to get bored,” Bull said. “I don’t think I will.”

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Beat the blahs

“The Great Escape” at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery through January features paintings, photographs, collages, and artists’ books by local artists: Scott Allen, Gillian Bull, Sue Cooley, Linda Costello, Diane Culhane, Linda Daily, Debbie Fecher, Denise Garcia, Jeannie Grisham, Denise Harris, M.J. Linford, Peter Manning, Beth Moga, Leah Tarleton, Fred Truitt and Kay Walsh. Call 842-3132 for more information.