Morgan was interviewed and photographed for cover by Tasja Keetman in The Artful Mind, March 2018. Read on issuu.com
UPDATE | visual artist
MORGAN BULKELEY Interview by Harryet Candee Hey, hi! Welcome to a new age of enlightment, Morgan. We were all thrown for a loop in 2020 with Covid, and other things. Tell us, what was life for you for over the past year? What are some of your thoughts about it all, and, did any of it affect your artistic career? The past two years, while I was working on this series of 64 carved/painted pieces, began as “Selfies”, beginning with a simple self portrait with a pileated woodpecker. As time wore on, events began to overwhelm me, COVID, friends dying or leaving, the world trembling. Many of the newer pieces were about “wounds”, or the consequent struggle with optimism and pessimism.
12 • NOVEMBER 2021 THE ARTFUL MIND
Photograph of Artist by Tasja Keetman
What new art work has come about? Tell us what you have been doing and working on. Have you altered your views on what you are creating now? Pieces, such as “No….Yes….No” contained a record of pain and confusion, as the gun does in “No….Yes….No” aimed at the four leaf clover lying on the Queen of Spades. Where does the bullet go? Luck or disaster? I was thinking of the structure of cubist painting where overlap and fracture compose space. “Goofyitis” is composed of varied levels of thoughts swimming in confusion. Four basic images, a brain stem (top left), a heart (top right), Venus of Willendorf (bottom left), and a Calabi-
Yau shape (bottom right) (this is a shape conjured by physics to support String Theory, which supposes ten instead of three spatial dimensions). Levels of objects, forms and paint sink beneath, while a whole different puzzle floats overall. You are presently in a new exhibit, what is this all about? My show at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston is my twelfth one person show there. It is a selection of 26 pieces from this series, the good, bad and ugly. I like the fact that you find the aging of wood,
