of crisply painted plants and animals.  Never static, tensions between Civilization and Nature ooze and flow from one painting to the next.  Sometimes Nature gains the upper hand (a crocodile swallows a human), sometimes a box of cornflakes commands center stage.   The vigilance is all.

There is something droll & accurate about the way a bird approaches the brightly printed packaging of a candy bar in A Moment. "Culture clash" may be too strong a phrase, but the juxtaposition has aesthetic purpose.  Eden, today, is more like a managed land trust, protected and respected by concerned citizens.  We can aspire to live there, but only as long as we are conscious of the consequences of our presence. 

Bulkeley's paintings raise the issue of our responsibility; the challenge of his work should affect the choices we make.  To his great credit, he gets his point across with sly humor, bold composition, a veteran's touch and masterful color.

Blissfully free of any allusion to current obsessions with get-rich-quick technology, these works of art belong to a tradition of easel painting that goes back to the Renaissance, and to a tradition of imagery that goes back to Pompeian frescoes, if not the transmigrational magic of animal paintings on Egyptian tomb walls. 

But the calculated visual disruption produced by Bulkeley's consumerist icons points to an increasingly challenged natural world as it is inundated with the ubiquitous evidence of logo-trash, even in places you might least expect to find it.  His roster of up-to-the-minute refuse, which dots the landscapes like perverse intruders, includes Campbell's soup cans, Band Aids and their boxes, Butterfingers, Mickey Mouse, Budweiser, cigarette packages, packs of Wrigley's gum, sticks of deodorant & other instantly identifiable household goods, usually linked in the pictorial space to some nearby bird or animal as pun.  The Bald Eagle, for example, in E.Z. Bird I.D. p.2, is inspecting a bottle of Rogaine.  These consumer icons encourage us to think of the paintings in their contemporary immediacy, in the same way that Eric Fischl’s paintings include TVs, walkmans, and contemporary art prints in order to be of our time. 

Bulkeley's works gather and identify a conflict; they entertain with persistent humor and remind us of consequences.  Is the wild bear about to crush the Statue of Liberty with one swipe of its paw?  Is the beaver chewing through a yellow pencil doing no more than the bidding of a misanthropic Luddite?  Is there a moral to this aesthetic tale?  Reap what you sow, practice what you preach?  Is this painter upset with man's cavalier attitude toward the environment,
or only toying with representation?  Does he chew Juicy Fruit gum?  Or does he just love to paint its bright packaging?  Are these maple panels, intensely crammed with vectoring birds, pencils, gum, sheets of newsprint, foliage, trees, and animals more about abstraction than symbolic narrative?  Are they about all the competing energies that hover within our post-modern minds? How can we see straight, do right? And, according to whose vision, whose interests?