If polar icecaps melted and rain fell endlessly and we suddenly needed an Ark stocked for the next millennium, I'd know who to call. In charge of lining up bird, beast, wildflower, tree & other phenomena of the natural world would be Morgan Bulkeley, in whose view of the creation no critter goes unvalued.  The son of a naturalist, and himself a lifelong devotee of bird and free-range beast, Bulkeley has a well-developed sense of the fragile balance in which nature and man co-exist.  In his world, rattlesnake, weasel, spoonbill and butterfly would file in next to thistle, fern, grass, and wildflower (among all things great and small) in one generously fluid category labeled: "All Equally Beautiful and Necessary."  Humans, too, would be included, but it is not clear if our species would be allowed above steerage. 

Because, alas, in every Eden there's a principle of otherness, and that otherness goes by the names of Satan, Greed, or "The Wrecking Crew,"-- those unenlightened, if hard-wired aspects of our general humanity.  Bulkeley's paintings address the conflict head-on, dramatizing the sometimes hilarious, often times dire clash of human culture with what is familiarly called Nature.  On the plains and rolling hills of his paintings, large forces are brought before the viewer in all their turmoil and strife.  Though a character add a beak to his face, and crude wings to his shoulders, that man can only aspire to fly.

Morgan Bulkeley's pictures are plausible fictions, fantasies in condensed form linking his great, robust feeling for the environment to the vagaries of his own personal life. With palette knife and brush on canvas, or carving and painting wood panels in low-relief, he represents a dynamic world of disparate things,