At The Still Point.....



In the small hamlet of Jordans in Buckinghamshire, there is a seventeenth-century Quaker meeting house which floods with light on a summer’s day. The sunlight drenches the high, clear glazing and even manages to penetrate the plain, unpolished deal panelling which surrounds the benches on the four sides of the room. In certain places, the light filters through the woodwork in long, slender shafts that never quite manage to reach the top or bottom of the panels, but which enliven the wooden surrounds with their vertical glimmers. At the same time, the act of watching, which evolves over time, accentuates the feeling of immense peace which emanates from this historic place. 
A similar experience may be enjoyed 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 canvases 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. The monochrome colouring of the series, predominantly blue-green rather than the brown hue of wood, is scarcely earth-bound, however. The soft azure tonalities belong rather to the elements of air and water, while the very imprecision of the borders and edges of the colour masses contained in the works is reminiscent of the effect of the descent of dusk on land or of dawn mist at sea. As with the experience in the meeting- house, these beautiful if fugitive images, create an unmistakable aura of quietness or even silence…The silence and light which emanate from Bullen’s paintings, although mysterious, are nevertheless not predicated on intimations of the mystical in the supernatural sense. Based, at least in part, on the reality of the Quaker experience and its concomitant concern with immanence, Bullen’s aesthetic is grounded in the specific awareness of the here and now, revealed through presence…What seems clear is that in Bullen’s new series, as in his earlier paintings, the slow unfolding of the work and its ultimate meaning rests in the reality of the viewer’s engagement with it in quietness and over time.

 Anna Moszynska,

Dark Light exhibition catalogue, Jill George Gallery, 2001.