Paula Bullwinkel: I’ll Be Your Mirror
“It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.” —Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer
Too edgy to be a fairytale but with a surrealist exuberance at home in a storybook, a painting by Paula Bullwinkel is a study in paradox, multiplicity, and doubling, as well as an occasion for lavish color, rich texture, layered symbolism, and all the plausible impossibilities of dream logic. Each one is a gem-like cavalcade of the absurd and unsettling, as humans share space with their outsized spirit animals, motifs repeat a tad off-axis, nature exists as an architectural topiary, and color is more keyed to emotion than evidence. In tea rooms, fields, forests, shops, boudoirs, suburbs, and inventions, children and adults fight and frolic with their counterparts—both the energetic manifestations in the form of bears, bunnies, dogs, wolves, boars, burros, and cats, cats, cats, as well as their own doubled selves.
In fact it is the structure of the doppelgänger concept—the suspicious duplicate, the unknown twin—which provides the constant armature for Bullwinkel’s work in the terrain of the human mind. Less intrigued by the literal possibility of finding one’s alleged “twin” and more engaged with the psychoanalytical and mythological implications of duality within identity and sense of self, Bullwinkel plays with the idea that we each of us already contain multitudes. Her subject is the world of shades and shadow selves, daemons and familiars, latent truths and all the other alive, in-between things we carry around. Literature and film are full of stories about confronting the “other self,” but no one ever asks, as these paintings do, "What if I am the other? What if I’m the evil twin? What if it’s me?”
Yes, these paintings seem to say. You are, and it is. It’s you. It’s all you. Across the multiverse in proliferate wild hues of mint, lavender, ochre, crimson, indigo, buttercup; dressed in stripes, lace, velvet, fur, simple nightdresses, and Sunday bests; performing for an audience or believing yourself alone—across all these scenes and more, in amusement parks, city streets, and manicured front yards, it’s always and already been all inside of you. These imperfect, or more precisely, asymmetrical twinships are keen to be read as metaphors, as Bullwinkel introduces enough difference between the pairings to keep the liminal space from settling into comfortable balance. What separates them? Time, the marks of experience, the assertion of differentiated individualism? A bigger, more ferocious giant animal companion? A sassier hairdo?
Her characters and creatures are active characters in her scenes, not passive symbols—but also they are symbols, and she flattens the pictorial space of her compositions to emphasize their allegorical voice and uncanniness. Equally influenced by literature and film flirting with the multiverse, and channeling art historical tactics of the late Impressionists and Fauvists, the Leipzig School, Rauch, and Eisenman, Bullwinkel finds herself in a place both archetypal and futuristic. The strangeness of her assembled elements is contextualized within a world of imagery that is recognizable enough to be familiar, but strange and saturated with enough detail to invite interpretation. Similarly, there is an absence of identifiable race to the portraits, which both challenges whiteness as art’s default, and expands the sense that the figures can act as stand-ins, in whom everyone might see themselves. That is to say, both or all of their selves.
—Shana Nys Dambrot,
Los Angeles, 2023
Artist’s Statement
A narrative and surrealistic painter, I am fascinated by doppelgängers. Folklore tells us everyone has a doppelgänger or a “double-goer”, a mysterious, identical copy, both
familiar and strange, suggesting the possibility of multiple universes where infinite versions of one’s life plays out simultaneously. Parallel universes make up all that exists: space, time, matter, energy, everything. Astoundingly, this seeming myth is a theory supported by modern physics since the 1950’s. This series of paintings, called The Travelers, implies the space and time we observe is not the only reality. With recent hit films such as “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and best-selling novels such as “The Anomaly,” the multiverse concept is huge in popular culture, yet I have doubled for decades.
My animal-protagonists are saviors and the essence of spiritual goodness. At one extreme, they can be bravely ferocious, at the other, they’re innately solid and determined. As familiars, they are an essential part of the characters.
The women, children and animal-heroes in my artwork are balancing thoughts of foreboding or mystery with a sense of celebration. It is a quest for self, embracing or wrestling for equilibrium between the coherent and incoherent and the fearful and bold. Most of my people are brown or unusual colors because I grew up in a multi-racial family, and “white” skin has plenty of representation in the history of figurative painting.
I work in oil on canvas, building by scraping, wiping, brushing and dripping in many layers to create a rich surface of texture or implied texture. My influences include Dorothea Tanning for her iconic otherworldliness and narrative, and Paula Rego and Neo Rauch for their symbolism, humor and painterly technique.
My figures have an important mission. They are in dialogue, in collusion, in conflict. The outlook can be amusing, but also strange and risky. The dark side reflects our society today, our shocking willingness to beat down the vulnerable, while the bright side evokes our chance and hope. A visual tension between the two generates energy, as does the juxtaposition of symmetry and asymmetry. The images are about the hardest part of the trip; the intersection between potential and conflict.
Résumé
ONE AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2024 Soul of a City, Fondation Grand Cachot, Visarte Neuchâtel, Switzerland and Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA
2024 Barber Library Rotunda, Bend, OR
2023 Hounds of Love, Coos Art Museum, Coos Bay, OR
2021 Brouhaha, Transmission Gallery, Oakland, CA
2019 25% Americans Approved, Franklin Crossing Atrium, Bend, OR (censored)
2019 25% Americans Approved, At Liberty Gallery (now Scalehouse), Bend, OR
2019 Figuratively Speaking, At Liberty Gallery, Bend OR
2018 The Poet is a Thief of Fire, Franklin Crossing Atrium, Bend, OR
2015 Play It As It Lays, Bend Art Center / Atelier 6000, Bend, OR
2014 Hastings Cone Gallery, Vashon Island, WA
2011 Virginia Inn, Seattle, WA
2009 All the Fun, The Pines Gallery, Hood River, OR
2006 Gallery 3.5, Montclair State Univ., NJ
SELECTED GROUP SHOWS
2024 Crabwalk, Bry Hall Gallery, University of Louisiana, Monroe, Louisiana.
2023 Open Show, Los Angeles Art Association, Gallery 825, Los Angeles
2023 Full Bodied, Los Angeles Art Association, Gallery 825, Los Angeles2023
2023 In Limbo, curated by Emily Zaiden, Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA
2023 Full Bodied, Los Angeles Art Association, Gallery 825, Los Angeles
2023 New Painting, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, curated by Rachel Gugelberger, NYC
2023 Pint Size, assemblage, Transmission Gallery, San Francisco
2022 The Figure, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2022 Expressions West 2022, Coos Art Museum, Coos Bay, OR
2022 Rooted, High Desert Museum, Bend, OR
2022 What is Love, Arc Gallery, Chicago, IL
2021 San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild Summer Exhibition, CA
2021 Solitude, Arc Gallery, Chicago, IL
2020 Gesture and Motion, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2020 A Generous Kingdom 4, Verum Ultimum Gallery, Portland, OR
2019 Drawing, Site:Brooklyn, curated by Olga Valle Tetkowski, Brooklyn, NY
2019 Emerging, Arc Gallery, Chicago, IL
2019 Artists’ Annual Show, Kala Gallery, Berkeley, CA
2018 Rise: Empower, Whitney Modern, Los Gatos, CA
2018 10th Annual Nat’l Juried Show, Prince Street Gallery, NYC
2018 Imprint, Salem Art Association, Salem, OR
2017 Spring Show, Portland Art Museum Rental Sales Gallery, Portland OR
2017 HeArt of The Matter, Franklin Crossing, Bend
2016 Ube Art, Berkeley, CA
2015 Monument for Bicyclists; A Day In Paradise, collaborative project with Portland Art Museum,OR
2015 Faculty Show, Pence Gallery, COCC, Bend OR
2014 Franklin Crossing, Figurative Painting, Bend, OR
2012 Beyond the Demos, Jordan Schnitzer Museum, Eugene, OR
2010 Beyond The Demos, PNCA, Portland, OR
2009 Double Exposure, Atelier 6000, Bend, OR
2008 Tumalo Art Gallery, Bend, OR
2005 Gallery 3.5, Montclair State University, NJ
2005 Women’s Resilience/Que Pasa Aqui, Montclair State, NJ
1995 Mars Bar Gallery, NYC
GRANTS/FELLOWSHIPS/RESIDENCIES
Vermont Studio Center, artist residency, May-June 2023
Hangar International Artist Residency, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2021
Chalk Hill Residency Sponsorship, Sonoma, CA July 2021
Oregon Arts Commission grant, May 2021
Profiled by the PBS television series Oregon Art Beat, produced by OPB, 9 minute segment, aired October 2020
Brush Creek Artist Residency, WY, 2018
Kala Art Institute Residency, Berkeley, CA 2018
Playa Summer Lake Residency, OR 2018
Djerassi Artist in Resident Program, Woodside, CA 2017
Ford Family Foundation Fellowship 2017
REVIEWS/ARTICLES
Art Squat Magazine “Paula Bullwinkel” December 2022
Cascades Arts and Entertainment Magazine “Artists and Their Influences: Paula Bullwinkel” December 2021
OPB article “Artist Paula Bullwinkel Takes On Donald Trump” October 2020
Bend Bulletin “Q&A With Artist Paula Bullwinkel” April 201
EDUCATION
Master’s in Art, art education, minor in painting with artist/Professor Julie Heffernan, Montclair State University, New Jersey.
Bachelor of Arts, English Literature, minor in painting with artist/Professor Joan Brown, University of California, Berkeley