The Reader: Circles of Community #90: September 24, 2014 Issue

Circles of Community: Joanna Tebbs Young

Red eyes stare out from white faces, their red mouths open as if singing, talking, screaming, or in one scene, possible on the brink of orgasm. These are just some of the characters in Fran Bull’s latest art project: Stations. Alluding to the classical Stations of the Cross, the fourteen scenes of people in bed are in a style of high relief of Greek or Roman sculptures. Using muslin, plaster, paint, and other mediums, Bull has created what she calls “an intuitive work” of the “places we stop, where we have private, internal, meditative, fearful experiences.”

Bull, a Brandon resident since 2000, has lived and worked as a professional artist for over 45 years. Describing herself as a “serious kid” who “drew obsessively” and made things while telling stories in her head about the art she was creating, she feels her current work in plaster, after years as a highly successful internationally-selling watercolor “photo realist” in New York City, has bought her full circle. “It’s a wonderful feeling to make things with your hands, you feel like a god.”

Her early classes at an art museum in her hometown of Newark, NJ in which she was enrolled every semester and summer from eight to fifteen years old, gave her experience in every medium. She now doesn’t identify with one medium. “It depends on what medium will carry what I want to express,” she says.

First coming to Vermont to pursue a BA in liberal arts from Bennington College, where she was “interested in everything,” she went on to get a second degree in textile design, and then a MA in Art and Arts Education from NYU, where she was also teaching.

After 14 years painting and showing and selling works which she describes as being like needlepoint in their minute detail, in the Louis Meisel Gallery, Bull realized it was, “not who I am. I was evolving.”

In the 1980s, she left the gallery hoping, as she says, to “break through to my authentic artist self” in Ireland. But it didn’t work as she had hoped. “You can’t force the muse!” says Bull. But huddled in her thatched cottage by the gray sea, she began to do some “horrible” little ink drawings while reading the Jungian scholar Marion Woodman’s books. “I was valuing where the art wanted to go, it was less directed, and I knew what I had to pursue. This was the door I had to walk through,” she says.

She went onto pursue other art forms and projects, including etchings (of which she has a book coming out in Barcelona), and maintaining studios in New York City, New Jersey, and eventually Vermont. Choosing Vermont for the beauty she recalled from her undergrad days in Bennington, Brandon found her, she says. Discovering only after she moved that it had an energetic artist community, it was there she ran Gallery in the Field from 2005-2011. “There is a vibrancy here not found in New York,” she says.

“When people see my art, I want them to be inspired to make their own,” Bull says. “I don’t want there to be a divide.”

Speaking to the importance of art to a community, Bull says it is, “a sense of creating an art community that honors the community itself; providing them places to go and conversations to have. A community is a gift to the art and art a gift to the community. And everyone is invited.”

Fran Bull’s “Stations”

Chaffee Downtown and Castleton Downtown Gallery

September 24-October 25

Opening Reception: Friday, September 29, 5pm – 7pm

Artist Talk: Wednesday, October 15, 7pm - 8:30pm at The Paramount Theatre

Joanna Tebbs Young is a Writer and Writing Workshop Facilitator living in Rutland. Contact her at joanna@wisdomwithinink.com, wisdomwithinink.com, facebook.com/TheWritersRoomatAllenHouse or on Twitter at @jtebbsyoung.