Local artist Angela Bullard’s artwork will be featured on the first floor of the Ozarks Small Business Incubator, 408 Washington Ave., through the end of June.
Bullard grew up in the Ozarks and said she has loved art from an early age, taking art classes all through high school and college. She moved to Chicago to pursue an acting career and had an active stage career, taught acting classes at Second City and was on the NBC television show Chicago Fire. In her spare time, she continued to create visual art, taking classes with nationally-known Chicago artist Ingrid Albrecht.
After moving back home to West Plains in 2015, Bullard said wanted to focus on her work in the visual arts, so she set up a studio space at home and started taking classes with locally renowned artist Regina Willard. In less traditional forms of art, such as needle-felting, acrylic pouring, alcohol inks and encaustics, Bullard is self-taught. She enjoys working and experimenting in oils, watercolors, pastels, pencils, gouache, acrylics, wax, ink and fiber.
Bullard has been the recipient of multiple awards for her art in the spring show at the Harlin Museum, as well as in its professional juried fall show. She has also been awarded top ribbons at the Heart of the Ozarks Fair, also winning the People's Choice Award for her abstract piece "Metamorphosis.”
She teaches various workshops at the Harlin Museum and for the West Plains Council on the Arts, from needle felting to acrylic pouring to crochet. Bullard also previously served as president of the West Plains Artist's Guild in West Plains.
Bullard was awarded an Honorable Mention Broadening Opportunities Scholarship from the Broad Ideas art group, based in Galena, Ill., from its 2021 Virtual Art Show. Her most recent art exhibit at the Harlin Museum, "Out of This World,” was funded by that scholarship and was met with great local success.
“I have loved all things creative and artistic since I was a child,” shares Bullard. “Getting colored yarn or a painting kit was my idea of heaven! I loved fiber art — crocheting clothes and blankets for my dolls, creating everything from latch hook rugs to God's eyes with popsicle sticks, and pom-poms for my classmates.
“I experimented with clay; making clay pots from the red clay found in the riverbank on the farm I grew up on and letting them dry in the sun. I would go on ‘photo shoots’ with my instant camera to take images of the world around me — the fields, the trees, old barns. I colored in coloring books, fascinated by all the names and colors in the Crayola assortment. It was the joy of my life to create and make something new that had never existed before, to see how the experiments I took would turn out and what I could try next. But most of all, how did my artwork make me feel, how did it make others feel? I wanted to have an impact with what I was creating.”
Bullard describes the exhibition as an eclectic assortment of her work, including needle-felted landscapes, encaustic florals and acrylic abstracts.
“It is a show about my journey as an artist and all the experiments I have done, some more successful than others, but still a part of the evolution of my artistic eye,” she explains. “Abstract work can be difficult for some viewers to wrap their minds around, so I like to think that the secret to viewing abstract art is not to think of it as a traditional painting, it's more a painting of ‘feeling.’ What does the painting evoke in your memory or emotions when you look at it? Colors can affect this feeling as well as the shapes and lines within a piece.
“Try looking at an abstract piece with your inner emotional eye and see what you can find. Everyone's experience is different, it doesn't have to be like anyone else's experience. Abstract work can seem otherworldly or surreal, like something in a dream but it is also tethered to what we know and experience in our everyday lives. Come, take a look, and see what images speak to your imagination!”
The West Plains Council on the Arts and OzSBI have partnered to bring quarterly art displays to the incubator. Visitors may view the display at the incubator during OzSBI’s business hours, anytime between 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday.
A Meet-the-Artist event will be held from 3 to 4:30 p.m. May 30 in OzSBI’s lobby. The public is invited to attend to meet Bullard and view and discuss the pieces on display.
For more information about the exhibit, contact Madison Sutterfield at OzSBI, madisonsutterfield@ozsbi.com, or WPCA Coordinator Audrey Scott, audrey.scott@zizzers.org.
