Over the weekend, I went home to visit friends and family that I had not seen in a long time. Even though I only live 45 minutes away, it’s hard to find time to get home since I am so busy with my work. Once I arrived in Bucks County, my mom and I decided to take a nice day trip together to a place called Peddler’s Village, a moderate sized collection of unique stores and boutiques in Lahaska, Bucks County. Peddler’s Village has a wide range of art galleries, but the one that stands out in my mind was a place called Lighthouse Galleries. A lot of the art there inspired me through color, because they had a lot of work by an artist by the name of Simon Bull. His style really spoke to me because I love flowers and bright colors, and that combination really satisfied me in his work.
Though it was hard to choose which painting to write about, I decided on a floral piece called Desire. When I first set eyes on it, I couldn’t look away for some time. It gave me a feeling of peace because it was easy on my eyes and the color combination was very attractive. Red is one of my favorite colors because of its richness and brightness, and Bull uses the red in a way that satisfied me. The acrylic painting has a good balance of warm and cool colors that work well for the meaning of the piece. I love when an artist uses the whole palate in a way that works for the message of the piece. Since the piece is called Desire, I think that the rich colors really evoke that emotion.
Someone who doesn’t understand art might look at this work and wonder how a flower evokes an emotion such as desire. I know that an emotion can be evoked through much more than the object itself. In this case, the rich deep tones express the feeling much more than the actual flower. I appreciate that, because I just did a project in 2D exploring this technique. We had to use a simple object and evoke an emotion solely through color. I found it to be a good challenge since the object itself was simply a vase, and I was aiming to show loneliness through color only. I used deep blues, purples and greens mixed with blacks and grays. I feel as though it showed some sort of sad emotion, but it was hard to zero in on loneliness specifically. So this is another way that I appreciate Bull’s painting, because I understand how challenging it is to convey an emotion. If this piece was a yellow flower with a warm colored background, it would change the message completely. But since the title is Desire, I see a connection between the meaning of the word itself and the bright, sexy aura that the color red portrays. The use of darks, particularly black and the dark purples, help to portray a yearning feeling.
The more I examine this piece as I’m writing about it I like it even more. I really get an exciting feeling through the combination of colors, that I rarely get from paintings I see every day. It may be because I am partial to bright colors, but I also appreciate the balance of the added blacks and other darks. It really makes the red pop even more. And the orange that is added to the red also makes it more interesting to look at. I notice that Bull uses rainbow in an effective way. He experiments with color and uses them in a good proportion. If all of the colors he uses in his piece were used to an equivalent degree, the painting would read differently. He uses red and/or red-orange in about three quarters of the piece, but balances it out with strokes of greens, yellows, blues, purples and blacks. You can tell this artist is very passionate about his craft because he shows it through color in multiple pieces I saw at the gallery. I am now a fan of Simon Bull, and I have bookmarked his page on my computer. I hope to see more art like his that speaks to me in such a way through color; I’m more than excited that I discovered him.
