PROVENANCE

Private Collection, Northland, Purchased from Rotorua's Art & History Museum exhibition 1989

EXHIBITED

Edward Bullmore, One Decade On, The Bath-House, Rotorua's Art & History Museum, 15 November 1988 8 February 1989

Edward Bullmore: A Surrealist Odyssey, Tauranga Art Gallery 2008, Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland 2009, Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore 2009

ILLUSTRATED p. 70 Edward Bullmore: A Surrealist Odyssey, Penelope Jackson, Tauranga Art Gallery 2008

Edward Bullmore was born in Southland. He attended Canterbury University College alongside Pat Hanly, Bill Culbert and Michael Browne. Having taught at Tauranga Boys' College in the late 1950s he headed to Florence with his wife Jacqueline. The Bullmores spent six months in Italy then lived in London from 1960 until 1969. During that time, apart from teaching at various art schools, Bullmore exhibited widely and attracted critical attention from the art world. Among his collectors from this era was filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who featured two of Bullmore's works in in his 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange.

In between painting the Transition Series and the Cuba Crisis Series (1962), Bullmore completed a small suite of works that were clearly influenced by his immediate surroundings in London. The Sitters show his movement away from painting in a clean crisp manner to a looser handling of paint, helping to create an atmosphere of ambiguity. The subject of this painting can be related to his interest in the theatre; the old tramps in The Sitters could easily be characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). Bullmore's bread and butter job at this time in London was as a screen shifter at the Royal Court Theatre, meaning he was familiar with contemporary theatre.

In The Sitters figures are seated on a park bench in close proximity to a church graveyard. His subjects are physically and psychology close to death, their despair is both individual and collective. Interestingly Bullmore's backdrop of a gothic arched, Victorian church contrasts to the box-like warehouses of post-war London. The mood of the painting is further enhanced by the stark, leafless trees reaching skyward.

Both The Sitters and Transition No. 8 are offered with excellent provenance. The works are fine examples from the artist's London years which culminated in his exhibiting with Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro in The Enchanted Domain: Surrealist Art at Exeter City Gallery and Exeter Gallery in 1967. Bullmore's London period was characterised by experimentation and prolificacy. On his return to New Zealand his work would not meet with the same degree of acceptance as achieved during these London years. Penelope Jackson