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As an older generation of trendsetters thins out, artists who have defied conventional classifications come to the forefront. One such person is Vermont artist Fran Bull, a participant in the Photorealist movement through the early 1980s who exhibited at the Louis Meisel Gallery in New York City. Her painstaking acrylics and watercolors embellished found images of zebras, storks and monarch butterflies in watery reflections. But Bull wasn’t content with mastery of a single style. In her late 40s, she left the New York fast track for a more personal, multidisciplinary journey.
From then on, Bull’s painting style expanded into exuberant fluid abstraction on paper and canvas, painted plaster reliefs, sculpture and multi-room installations, all enriched with poetry and philosophy.
Later in life, her large-scale etchings, paintings and dimensional work started traveling widely to galleries and museums in Italy and Spain, including LOA Gallery in Milan. A book of etchings is in the permanent collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de Cataluña in Barcelona. She showed at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and 2019.
Vermont gallerist Petria Mitchell offered Bull a retrospective last September at Brattleboro’s Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts that is being followed by a return engagement this May. The brilliantly pigmented abstract acrylics in “Space: an odyssey,” all painted since January 2024, are a supernova that will literally overflow into a satellite site across the street. Inspired by the James Webb Telescope’s probing of intergalactic space, the series develops a fantasia on the births of galaxies from a purportedly human perspective.
Each work develops its own emphasis on the themes of boundaries and boundedness, managing edges between layered interiors, no-man’s lands and outer frames with a subtlety that foregrounds the unique character of each work. In “Red Light,” a scarlet mantle isolates an area of white protoplasm speckled with dots and disk-like inclusions. From its bilious depths a dark rocket erupts and shoots outward as though piercing a layer of armor to reach the brilliant exterior. “Zodiac,” a work of similar size, is girdled by a more muted red band that encases a teeming mass of orange and yellow orbs, red blobs and fuchsia nuggets. These seem to be on more peaceable terms with their surrounding territory.