Lux Aeterna: 9 - Fran Bull, c. 1991

Lux Aeterna: 9 by Fran Bull comes from her Lux Aeterna series, a body of work concerned with emotion, perception, and the visual possibility of inner experience. Bull wrote of the series: “An artist of my acquaintance once asked: Do feelings have a look? The pragmatist and the phenomenologist say: No! These drawings on paper in acrylic paint are more or less about the look of feelings.” This statement gives the series its central question, but not its answer. What remains most elusive about the Lux Aeterna works is the specific feeling attached to each image. By leaving the feeling unnamed in the title, and by refusing to place her finger too heavily on the scale of interpretation, Bull allows the viewer to determine the emotional register through encounter rather than explanation.

The title Lux Aeterna, meaning “eternal light,” introduces another layer of analysis. Light suggests revelation, transcendence, and spiritual endurance, yet Lux Aeterna: 9 does not present clarity in any simple sense. Instead, the work feels crowded, tangled, and unsettled. The promise of light exists, but it must push through a field of interruption, density, and obscuring marks. Bull does not give us feeling as something pure or easily illuminated. She gives us feeling as something layered, unstable, and difficult to separate from everything that surrounds it.

The series shares artistic similarities with Bull’s zygote works, where masses of cells appear caught in the process of change. Feelings, too, change and complicate themselves. They are rarely fixed states. They gather, divide, contradict, and mutate. Though abstract, Bull gives feeling a semblance of form through differentiated line work: looping contours, cellular structures, ink-like bursts, sharp red notations, blue linear passages, and clustered circular motifs. The marks seem to behave like emotional particles, each one contributing to a system that remains alive but unresolved.

Lux Aeterna: 9 is one of the few pieces in the series that feels condensed within an almost rigid container of line and color. Bull confirms line is often used as a container. The composition is densely packed, as though the emotional field has been compressed into a single charged body. Pink and red forms push through the work with bodily intensity, while black washes and dark splatters obscure, interrupt, and distort them. Blue and green lines move across the surface like diagrams, wires, veins, or systems of thought trying to organize what cannot be easily organized. The result is an image that feels both biological and psychological.

The circular, organelle-like structures throughout the piece reinforce this sense of internal activity. Some resemble cells, eyes, or flowers. Others feel like coded symbols from a private emotional alphabet. They invite interpretation without allowing certainty. Bull gives the viewer plenty to read, but no stable grammar with which to read it. This is part of the work’s power. It behaves like feeling itself: legible in flashes, but resistant to full translation.

The black overlays are especially important. They do not simply provide contrast; they obstruct. They cloud the pink and red underpainting, interrupt the line work, and create a sense of emotional interference. Whatever feeling the piece evokes, what remains certain is that the black forms act as a kind of blockage or accumulation. They suggest the way emotion can be buried under memory, fear, fatigue, resentment, grief, or unresolved thought. The image does not confess one feeling. It stages the difficulty of accessing feeling at all.

There is also a claustrophobic intensity to the composition. Unlike works that allow their forms to drift freely across open space, Lux Aeterna: 9 feels gathered into a pressured center. Marks overlap and crowd one another. Lines cross, circle, bind, and entangle. The eye moves rapidly across the surface but struggles to find rest. This gives the piece an almost nervous energy, as though the work is actively thinking, remembering, or trying to articulate something just beyond language.

Perhaps this is what a skeptical Bull is hinting at throughout the series: that if feelings do have a look, they would not appear as simple symbols or clean emotional categories. They would be abstract, complex, contradictory, and layered with competing emotions and accumulated baggage. A feeling would not look like happiness, sadness, or discontent in isolation. It would look more like this: a collision of color, pressure, residue, vitality, and obstruction.

This gives Lux Aeterna: 9 a particular maturity. Bull avoids giving us a work that simply says happy, sad, anxious, or wounded. Instead, she shows how difficult it can be to express what we feel, even when a work is actively trying to coax it out of us. The painting becomes less an illustration of emotion than a record of emotional complexity. It asks whether feeling can be seen, then answers with a beautiful complication: perhaps feeling can be seen, but only in fragments, distortions, layers, and flashes of light beneath the dark.