Behind these paintings is a conscience in which the politics of land management, the preservation of threatened species & the importance of direct physical experience of nature are all critically important values.  For if it is true that Capital's voracious entrepreneurship is gobbling up open land's unspoiled wonder at a frightening clip (50 acres a day in greater Atlanta alone), then who will protect the rights of species who from "time immemorial" (is this another fiction?) have inhabited those sites?  But to rant would be wrong, and might reduce his paintings to no more than visual essays of social outrage, which they are not.

Because, first and foremost, Morgan Bulkeley is an artist, which is to say, his job is to make art of what he knows and feels, transforming any experience to his imaginative purpose. If grown men masquerade as birds, if couples locked in passionate embrace unravel, if birds see through the eyes of men and vice versa, so be it.  His work accepts the complexities, indeed, it composes with them.  It's not just a Darwinian jousting for turf.  What radiates from Bulkeley's Peekable Kingdom, besides his wry disgust, is the signature skill with which he handles the formal elements of light, form, and perspective.  His full spectrum summer hills wave as they recede, the stylized leafiness of his trees stand like sentinels overlooking the collisions. 

In I'm Flying…Aren't I?, a birchbark car has just crashed into a birchbark sofa out in a field, and the force of the impact has sent the driver flying through the air, or so it seems.  If it takes a collision to generate the question of the painting's title, is this wit, or satire?  Pride, or humility?  The best a man can do?  But can't we dream?  In the right foreground, birds are arranged in different degrees of attention around a can of Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup.  If you remember the phrase, "a chicken ain't nothing but a bird," you see the situation as an anxious moment.  What bird wouldn't be concerned?  Campbell's Chunky Spoonbill. . .but for a simple twist of fate?

And in the background, like a joke sculpture or horrible tragedy -- or the distant memory of Wind in the Willows -- a birch plane has crashed into a birch building. This painting seems to be saying, give it up, boys. Flight is given to birds, not humans.  What's natural is a fact.  Keep your feet on the ground.  Live with it.

Morgan Bulkeley comes to his good sense from long familiarity and appreciation of nature's multifarious and overlapping dramas of expression, hunger and survival.  He combines his sympathetic knowledge of bird and landscape with a shaman's sense of artistic creation, producing unique "go the stippled extra mile" works in which no detail is too insignificant to dwell on, as there is no moment like the present to hush the mind and let a painting tell you its hidden story.