Paula Bullwinkel

The work is influenced by a fluctuating stream: dreams of gorgeous colors, nightmares of lost friends and family members, the zeitgeist, the last president bragging of sexual assault, textile patterns, the sound of the rivers, memories of mom working long hours, oblivious to all else, in her ceramics studio, my photographs, the writing of Elena Ferrante. Life is sometimes incoherent and absurd. Beauty is counterbalanced by spooky, sinister with boring, fun with forlorn. The dark side can reflect our shameful society today; our shocking willingness to beat down the vulnerable, while the lighter side evokes our chance, our hope, shining forth, when time is taken to look more closely. There is a tension between the two that creates energy.
Born in Northern California, I spent my childhood making little animals in my mom’s ceramic studio, playing for hours in the woods, and concentrating fully on imaginary characters I invented. Before painting, I was an editorial fashion and portrait photographer in NYC and London for 18 years, a rare woman in a very male-dominated field, working for the best mags. I was trying to capture the female figure and attitude in the form of a narrative. The story was usually fantastical and sometimes absur...

ARTIST RESIDENCIES AND GRANTS:
HANGAR Art Research Center residency, Lisbon, Portugal 2021
Oregon Arts Commission Grant, 2021
Chalk Hill Artist Residency, Sonoma CA 2021
Brush Creek Artist Residency, WY 2018
Kala Institute of the Arts, Berkeley, CA 2018
Playa Summer Lake, OR 2018
Djerassi Artists Program, Woodside, CA 2017
Ford Family Foundation Grant 2017
Ringholtz Award 2016