lives and works in Great Barrington, MA
contact- andybullardii@gmail.com
MFA Painting Indiana University 2020
BFA Painting Georgia State University 2014
Visiting Professor – Visual Studies
J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program 2021-2023
Artist in residence 33 Officina Creativa. Toffia, Italy. October 2023
January 2022
I am primarily an abstract painter, but all of my work comes out of an obsession with observation. I pull from a wide range of sources, each of which might be called “accidentally beautiful.” Whether it’s the glitchy way a moving figure refuses to be stitched seamlessly into a digital image within google street view, the interior form of a walnut reveled by squirrel’s teeth, a tree trunk that absorbs a fencepost through its growth, or palimpsests on a fire hydrant, they all revolve around an evidence of life activity and/or time having passed. Through large gestures of layering painting, drawing, and screen printing, my works take on a quick but awkwardly weathered and built-up surface of information.
Lately I have been making work centered around the idea of painting as metaphor for fossil – how various moments of time, life and information become compressed into one image that is completely still yet suggests a past that is visually present. I’ve been pulling pieces of drawn information from various things such as rocks, trees and dried flowers. A body of fast drawings begins to amass, and some drawings are combined, redrawn, overlapped, drawn again and so on. All these fast images serve as the soil for paintings to slowly grow out of. In these paintings abstraction is a means of visual rumination.