flooding our sensorium with their overlapping energies.  In each of the maple panel works, however coyly embedded, as if dreaming the action, or equal to it, is the image of a head, with two eyes, and a tooth-filled mouth--stand-ins for the "omniscient" consciousness of the artist.

It would be fascinating to hear Bulkeley "confess" the personal story-line encoded in this decade-long series, a series whose rigorous format showcases the artist's inventive stamina and indefatigable imagination.  One formal constraint used in this series was to include, over time, an example of each of the forty-three kinds of warblers that pass through Western Massachusetts.  Once accomplished, the series kept going -- new birds added, the warblers recycled -- by the useful force of its own improvisational, diaristic urges.

Bulkeley's use of autobiographical material (suitably transformed to take on general cultural resonance), allows him to incorporate important events in his life, symbolically, in something like the way Mondrian's love of tango led to "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," since art must have an experiential relationship to its maker.

You can't improve on a warbler, his work seems to say.  Or a skunk, wild turkey, or fox.  (Nor can you improve on the beauty of oil paint on canvas to summarize a complex vision.) Bulkeley's bright palette celebrates the role of light falling on every thing, including human foible, and of our sometimes capacity to see.  His paintings are like an allegorical reminder to wake up and sneeze the pollen, to value what direct perception is ours. 

To be nourished by the colorful immediacy of the ever-unfolding creation, we must check our human arrogance at the door.  It's not just a benign tolerance he's invoking, but a poet's praise of species diversity.  Which is not to eliminate Mickey Mouse at all -- that oft-painted icon belongs to the species known as "pop-culture" -- but to know him for what it is.

Though by necessity a witness, mankind is frequently just an annoying extra on the set, sure to mess things up.  More and more detritus from consumer culture takes its ingratiating place in the artist's sylvan settings, reminders of human agency.  In Bulkeley's world, the celebration of nature's bounty is contingent upon the containment of those forces which would disrupt or exploit its eloquent variety.

Taking landscape as central (sky above, ground below), Bulkeley's purpose is always and initially: make a compelling work. By painting what he knows and cares about (a naturalist's feeling for wild nature), his pictures make claims for free-spirited abundance and beauty.  But then a plane flies into the side of a building, or a cheap mass produced model of the Statue of Liberty is found sitting in a meadow.  Warring energies   are thus unleashed in his paradise of