When Your Love Surrounds Me VIII

Simon Bull (b. 1958, U.K./American) - "WHEN YOUR LOVE SURROUNDS ME VIII" - This is a 2009 lithograph with a plate signature in the lower left as well as hand signature of the artist in gold in the lower right. It is from a limited edition and numbered 653/695 at the bottom left. The image is 17" x 17" and with the mat and frame, it is 20 x 20 inches. Illustrated is a heart within a heart in Bull’s signature bold, bright colors.

Biography (excerpts from Wikipedia)
Simon Bull was born in Bedfordshire, England in March 1958, and currently lives in the USA. In 1976 he took a one year Foundation course at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design and went on to graduate in 1980 from Leeds Polytechnic with a BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art. He studied printmaking, fine art and the masters.
His professional career began at the age of eighteen, with his first one man show in Hong Kong in 1976. He has since held exhibitions throughout Great Britain, in Amsterdam, Paris, Bologna Italy, Dubai, Japan, Hong Kong and throughout the USA.
He has been represented by some of the largest publishers and art distribution companies in the art world, and is currently represented by Park West Gallery, the world’s largest independently owned art dealership. Park West showcase Bull’s work on cruise ships worldwide.
The focus of his early work was on landscape, flowers, farm animals and pastoral scenes. He employed the plein air method of working and traveled extensively throughout Britain, the Mediterranean and Asia, documenting and depicting what he saw in a clear naturalistic way.
He gained recognition early on in his career for his detailed etchings and watercolors, but in the early nineties the artist developed and began using bold colors and a more gestural painting style. He developed a method of combining etching, aquatint, acrylics, pastel and gold leaf to create a series of images that were to become commercially very successful.
By the late nineties the artist was beginning to work on a larger scale, using oils and then acrylics. Drawing inspiration from his garden, he embarked on a series of intensely colored large close up images of flowers that were first showcased at a sell out One Man show in Harrods, London.
With the advent of giclee printing and the emergence of a strong North American market for his work after the year 2000, he shifted his emphasis to works on canvas. By 2007 he was moving away from the bold floral imagery that had defined a decade of his creative life and was experimenting again with new ideas; this time pouring, dripping and throwing paint onto canvas and board, often using black backgrounds and startling colors.
His current work represents a distillation and simplification resulting from almost four decades of artistic development expressing exuberance, pathos, purity, nostalgia and joy.