“It’s always like I’m building chaos, then I have to find my way back”
Drenching the canvas with a cacophony of riotous colour, Lucy Bull produces elemental paintings that pulsale with an unencumbered energy. Self-contained yet intuitively open-ended, 10:00 is a surrealist dreamscape espousing a poetic painterly composition, one that celebrates the artist’s invented handling of paint in all its glory. Within this nebulous interplay of form and colour, Bull ignites associations with the organic and the cosmic, with fusion and rupture, as the painting unfurls before the viewer in all its emotional vitality.
Bull often titles her paintings for the times at which they were completed, if not for other fleeting phrases or neologisms that enter her periphery. Within 10:00, form and colour coalesce to produce a homogeneous surface, psychedelic and hypnotic in nature. Each of her works begins with an initial wash of loose, expressive brushstrokes, laying the groundwork for a sophisticated interplay between realism and abstraction. Harnessing a process called frottage, adapted by Max Ernst, Bull rigourously builds up layer upon layer, then etches the surface of her paintings to reveal earlier passages, and in doing so, unleashes hauntingly beautiful abstract and surrealist landscapes. This deliberate act of erasure reveals tantalising fragments of forms hidden beneath the surface, adding depth and complexity. Only occasionally does Bull use brushes in a conventional way, preferring to dab, stab, twist and scrape her paint instead. The artist explains: “It’s a dance between more compulsive, spontaneous mark-making and reflective sort of teasing out of various associations… Then I go back in with more automatic painting. Eventually, the older layers start to act as a relief. It becomes this interwoven experience of surprising landscapes or dreamscapes'' (the artist quoted in: Katie White, “The Endurance Test of Lucy Bull’s Visceral Abstractions,” Artnet News, 24 May 2024 (online).
“Ultimately what I’m trying to do is get to the point where there is potential for new avenues of discovery. The scratching feels like excavation; older marks in the beginning layers get pulled to the foreground. It’s similar to Max Ernst’s technique of frottage. I relate to how he talks about being a spectator to the making of his own work. When things finally open up and click, it feels like magic.”
Image: © Bridgeman Images 2024
Artwork: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2024 Bridgeman Images
Moving constantly and rhythmically between multiple paintings at any given time, Bull's artistic practice emerges from a masterful negotiation between meticulous precision and spontaneous impulse. The artist comments: “I work for long stretches of time. Sometimes I have to work all day to get to a place where I’m feeling loose and tapping into the right head space… Some days, I’m just laying out all this paint that I’m going to completely obliterate the next day” (Ibid.). The result – rippling tessellations of brilliant vermillion, neon yellow, and fluorescent blue – induces the viewer into a trance-like state, as cosmic forms erupt from the centre of the canvas, morphing into gauzy veils of scarlet and fuschia. The high-keyed palette is offset by wisps of cooler hues, producing an alchemical transmutation of compelling psychological complexity. Bull’s move from New York to Los Angeles influenced the artist’s palette in a profound way. Bull recalls: “I fell in love with the light and the flora and fauna here… There’s something about the sun in Los Angeles and how it bleaches everything out” (Ibid.). Further inspiration stems from her family – Bull’s mother, a painter and multimedia artist who would design textiles and dye fabrics when Bull was a child; and Bull’s father, a documentary filmmaker, worked closely with painter and film theorist Manny Farber. Indeed, primordial contours inject 10:00 with a kinetic ebullience, drawing the eye to each ripple of pigment and crescendo of hues, in which colours ebb and flow, swell and release, collide and crash to ricochet the viewer into abstract oblivion.
The present work was produced on the occasion of the Artists Inspired By Music: Interscope Reimagined exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2022, in which artists including Ed Ruscha, Amoako Boafo, Kehinde Wiley and Anna Weyant worked in tandem with music that inspires them. The exhibition came about as a celebration of the music label’s 30th anniversary. Among the artists referenced in the show were Dr Dre, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Nine Inch Nails, and Lady Gaga. 10:00 is a re-interpretation of Ska Punk band No Doubt’s song “Spiderwebs” – a raucous and unapologetic record, the opening lines of which are:
“You think that we connect
That the chemistry's correct
Your words walk right through my ears
Presuming I like what I hear”
Engaging with the medium of painting as a chemical experimentation with the ineffable possibilities of synesthetic perception, the true gravitas of Bull's painting lies in her extraordinary ability to evoke meaning solely through the interplay of shape, colour, and texture.
A kaleidoscopic maelstrom of chroma and texture, 10:00 exemplifies the mysticism of Bull’s enigmatic practice, in which her ethereal works stimulate a delicate wavering between conscious and unconscious thought in the viewer. Bull’s championing of abstraction has resulted in her astronomical rise in the art world. In 2023 Bull was awarded a pair of solo exhibitions at the Shanghai private institutions, The Long Museum and Pond Society, as well as institutional shows at The Warehouse in Dallas. Bull recently exhibited her third solo exhibition with David Kordansky in Los Angeles. Ash Tree ran from May to June this year, cementing her status as one of the most exciting abstract painters working today.