My practice is rooted in drawing and has been since 2008, when I chose to focus on the drawn mark as my primary medium. Prior to this, I worked across painting and printmaking between 1992 and 2007. My approach is methodical, utilising grids and geometry, alongside a repetitive, elementary activity of placing one mark after another in ordered sequences until a defined area is complete. As a result, drawing has become both my process and my outcome: each work exists simultaneously as an image and as an act of constructing. Like my previous work in paint and print, each drawing explores a two-dimensional surface as a perceptual and contemplative mode of making and perceiving.

When drawing, I dwell close to the surface and move slowly across it, paying attention to the singularity of each gesture as a form of mindful engagement. Formulating one mark after another over periods of time leads to a particular awareness in which each drawing can only be made at its own pace.  The drawings cannot be hurried; they have their own rhythm, activated by an intimate relationship between hand and eye, mark and surface, resulting in a heightened conception of time, bodily rhythm, and optical transformation. Each drawing hovers at the edge of sight and is designed to slow visual acuity, creating the appearance of an undulation across the paper’s surface, reflecting an interest in the experiential, embodied aspects of the optical and tactile in making and perceiving. From afar, a drawing may appear as a blank surface; from a middle distance, the drawing’s sensation and effect become visible; and, from close up, the reading is an accumulation of points and lines creating fields of tone.

At various times, I have thought that I have made major shifts in my practice, yet I return, time and time again, to my prevailing enquiry into the phenomenal nature of the picture plane through the creation of spatial and visual thresholds guided by meditative concentration, and shaped by qualities of stillness, lightness, shadow, balance, and proportion. I draw from curiosity and as a form of meditation, engaging with the world through tactile, sensory, and contemplative processes.

Duncan Bullen

February 2026