By Christina Nafziger

Berlin-based street artist James Bullough creates murals that you will not soon forget, as his incredible skill in painting is just as impressive as the scale of his work. The figures in Buillough’s work are in mid-motion, floating in air as they are dissected and fragmented through the artist’s distinctive style. The lines and angles formed in this aspect of his work create striking visuals that intensify the vibrating motion held in his subjects. Living in an urban mecca for street artists, Bullough also hosts VantagePoint Radio, where he talks with other artists working in this realm about their process and techniques, while really getting to know each artist’s personality. I have been a fan of Bullough’s work for a while now, and was fortunate enough to see a couple of his paintings at in L.A., which did not disappoint. After listening to VantagePoint Radio, I have a new respect for the artist as he documents these oral histories of the street art scene, archiving the stories of these important artists of our time.

Were you formally trained in painting? How did you get your start as a painter and muralist? Which came first: painting on canvas or painting on city walls?

I was never formally trained as a painter. My degree from college was in art education which is far more a teaching degree than it is an arts degree. After graduating I became a middle school art teacher, but it wasn’t until about seven years later that I decided to start painting myself. I found an accomplished local still-life oil painter who had an ‘open studio’ type of situation and I began dropping in once a week with my paints, a canvas, and a 6-pack. Together with a group of about 10 other aspiring painters, we came every week and basically learned how to paint through osmosis.

A couple years later I quit my teaching job, sold everything I owned and moved to Berlin to be a full time painter. It was only then, and in my 30’s that I became reacquainted with my teenage love of graffiti and picked up a spray can for the first time. Oddly, by learning more traditional painting techniques before experimenting with spray paint, it freed me from the confines of how spray paint was intended to be used. I was able to naively experiment with it as a new art tool and found that portraiture came quite naturally to me, which likely would not have been the case if I had come up painting graffiti as a youth.

Tell me a bit about your interest in the figure. What draws you to these moments of movement that you capture in your work?

Other than the typical Freudian motivations, I’m not really sure why the female figure has become my main focus. I started painting women the moment I picked up a brush and haven’t stopped since. I love painting flesh and find it to be extremely challenging, but also rewarding. As my work progressed over time, hair and movement became much more of a staple, which reinforced my focus on the female figure.

My earlier portrait paintings were mostly from the waist up, or even from the shoulders up, because I worked from photos and that’s what I had. Any time I wanted to show more of the figure I was always bothered by their interaction with the objects around them such as the chair they were sitting in or even just the ground they were standing on. I wasn’t interested in the setting, only the figure, but when I omitted the surroundings the posture and weight of the figure seemed awkward. To solve this, I started working with figures falling or jumping, and that’s when everything changed and became more about movement and tension and drama. Now I work quite often with dancers and performers and I ask a lot of my models to try and get powerful images that evoke non-specific emotions, which can be felt and read by every viewer differently.

Do you paint from life or do you use reference images? Do you personally know the subjects of your paintings?

I organize photo shoots with models and take hundreds of photos in various outfits and from various angles and lighting setups. I’ve created a huge database of images on my computer and every painting starts with me filtering through hundreds of photos until I see something that sparks my interest. I do most of my preliminary sketching in Photoshop by taking bits and pieces from many different photos to create one striking image. It is extremely rare that a painting of mine comes from one single photograph. I normally start with a photo that I like but then take an arm or a leg from another image (maybe even a different model from another photo shoot), and then a foot from another image, and so on until I’ve built something that feels both believable and dynamic. Once I’ve got the figure to a place where I’m happy with it, I then begin the process of fracturing or distorting it. By the time I put brush to canvas I’ve already been working on the reference image for countless hours.

Let’s talk about your radio show Vantage Point, which you co-host with Tom “Auto64.” Can you tell us about the moment you decided to create this podcast series? What boundaries do you aim to push through the dialogue that takes place through Vantage Point?

VantagePoint Radio (www.VantagePointRadio.com) was an idea I had after living in Berlin for a few years meeting so many different and interesting artists. I found myself time and time again sitting in a bar in deep conversation with different artists about their work and techniques. I found it really inspirational and informative. It just seemed logical that other people would be interested to hear these conversations, so I started recording them with my friend and producer Tom Phillipson and it was that simple. I felt that visual artists are only accessible two dimensionally, through their artwork and maybe through their written responses to interviews in magazines and such, but that leaves so much missing. Hearing an artist speak and discuss their work in long form gives such a rich insight to the artist as a person, from the things they say to the sound of their voice or an accent they might have. Being that I am an artist myself also adds an element to our conversations that a non-artists interviewer wouldn’t be able to access. We get deep and nerdy sometimes and that’s part of what makes the show so great. I also decided from the very first episode that every guest will choose 4 songs that we will play throughout the interview to break up the talking and give more insight to their personality. I think the formula is perfect and we’ve got seriously devoted fans who agree.

Who are some of the artists you’ve interviewed in the past?

Because Berlin is such a magnet for street artists and muralists, we were able to get some of the biggest names in the game and once the ball started rolling it never really stopped. We’ve now done over 100 individual one hour interviews with some of the most influential people in the urban contemporary art world from gallerists and museum heads like Thinkspace Gallery, Jonathan LeVine Gallery, and Yasha Young, to the top artists in the scene like D*Face, Dan Witz, Anthony Lister, Sandra Chevrier, Ron English, Tristan Eaton, Faith 47… the list goes on and on. What we’re most proud of is that we feel we have thoroughly documented the scene in a way nobody else has done and although there’s still a lot of ground to cover ,we feel like we’ve made a significant impact.

Originally from the U.S., what inspired you to make the move to Berlin? How is the street art scene there as opposed to where you were living in the U.S.?

Moving to Berlin seemed to be something that my life was headed towards for years before I even realized it. The first time I left the US was in 1989 for an international swim meet in Berlin. I was in 6th grade and already very obsessed with graffiti and hip hop culture, but when I saw the Berlin wall covered in spray paint it sparked something in me that never left. Ironically, it was only 30 days later that the wall unexpectedly came down. Fast forward twelve years or so and I am living in Australia where I fall in love with a girl from Berlin. Over the next five years I visit the city (and the girl) at least once a year and absolutely fell in love. I married the German girl and for the next five years we live together in Baltimore but visited Berlin often, and all the while I was becoming more and more interested in street art and painting and feeling like I needed a change in life. Berlin has long been one of the cultural centers of graffiti and street art in Europe and worldwide. Especially in my early visits, the city was just covered in paint. By the time I moved here in 2010, things had changed a bit but there were still plenty of places to paint and plenty of people painting. My dabbles in graffiti and street art eventually gave way to a serious focus on large scale murals and studio paintings, but the vibe of the city and my early days living here still lives in my work.

What would you say motivates your practice more than anything else?

My main motivation is and always has been other artists currently working and pushing themselves and their careers forward by always evolving and maturing their work and their practice. Up until a few years ago that focus was mostly on the artwork, but as my art making practice has turned into a career and a business, I now look at other artists as business men and women as well. I see an artist’s career as a separate but parallel kind of art project. Some are very good at it and others not so much. Some are better at the career part than the actual art making and somehow there’s room for everyone if they can just figure out what works best for them. My primary goal is and always will be to make outstanding art and continue evolving and pushing my work forward, but lately the business side of things has really got my interest and is motivating me to try new things and evolve in that area as well.

What piece of advice can you offer artists that are still developing their voice?

First thing is to just keep making stuff. Most of us are not that good for quite a long time, even when you think your art is getting pretty good it’s probably not yet… but it will be. If making art is your thing and you’re passionate about it, then just keep making it and don’t expect instant success. Eventually, you will start to settle into a style and at some point hopefully you will start to get a sense that people are responding to something that you’re doing. When that happens, take note of it and focus on that thing for a while. Really perfect that one thing and make it so that every time someone sees your work it’s undeniably yours. Consistency is huge when you’re trying to stake your claim in the art world.

Also, diversify yourself and give people multiple ways to discover you and rediscover you. In my early days I was making studio paintings for group shows, painting murals and posting images of them all over the internet, hosting my own radio show, working in a gallery, and going to every art event that I could. Each one of these outlets was a way for someone to find me and, in the beginning, that’s one of the most important things.