An increased energy and freedom in the handling of paint characterize the large paintings in which interstitial passages are no less meaningful than the figures and their allegories.  Skies, crowded with airy cloud chunks and knife-twists of color, are tour de force canopies above the drama of interspecies wariness and anxiety below.

If Bulkeley were to paint today's Sistine Chapel, a warbler would sit on the throne of god.  Humans would be relegated to small decorative panels, far from the central drama, as if by getting too close we might upset the natural rhythms of the creation.  Does this make him a misanthrope?  Nope. 

         Activist?  Yes.

         Dystopian?  Sometimes.

         Doctrinaire?  Jamais.

         Entertaining?  Always. 

Once the politics of the paintings is teased out, the true fun begins.  Only then do we consider this apparently fictional world for the strange invention that it is, even as it mirrors our own: light-grazed hills, leaf-thickened trees, spaces alive with man, bird and beast, in fretful and amazing confabulation.  Upon closer inspection, the playful intelligence of his protagonists (a spoonbill's curiosity, a wildcat's feral claw), is situated in the context of a brilliantly organized world of material things, whose witty juxtapositioning is guaranteed to generate a frisson in the viewers.  

Imagine Rip van Winkle waking in Sleepy Hollow, 1999, to find a birch-clad airplane crashed into the side of a birch-clad house.  Rip rubs his eyes again.  Incomprehensible.  He falls back to sleep for a hundred years.  What these paintings will tell of our time, 100 years from now, none of us will be around to know.  Planes?  Cars?  Dancing band-aids?  Dirigibles that seem to double as survival arks?  The perennial problem of balancing human freedom with human responsibility? 

As Monet painted red poppies in a field, and Morandi painted bottles, Bulkeley is painting skies filled with darting warblers.  It is a pleasure now, as we move into high millennial gear, to be part of Bulkeley's imaginative response to this fin de siècle.