Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Zanni - Fran Bull, C. 2016

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Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Zanni
Fran Bull, c. 2016

Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Zanni by Fran Bull contains … Read more Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Zanni
Fran Bull, c. 2016

Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Zanni by Fran Bull contains a rich intertextual allusion. The “Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing” portion of the title refers to William Butler Yeats’s poem Sailing to Byzantium, while “Zanni” refers to a character type from commedia dell’arte, best known as a clever servant, trickster, and agent of comic disruption. In Yeats’s poem, old age becomes an opportunity to turn away from the fading sensual world and toward a more permanent form of being through the cultivation of the soul. Bull’s title pulls that spiritual yearning into conversation with theatrical absurdity, creating a work that feels both elevated and mischievous.

This tension feels especially fitting within Bull’s exhibition We’re All at A Party Called Life on Earth, a larger-than-life body of work that celebrated a strange, almost Dada-inflected existence through caricatures drawn from circuses, amusement parks, and commedia dell’arte. Rather than treating life as solemn passage alone, Bull frames it as performance, masquerade, and spectacle. The soul may clap its hands and sing, but here it does so through the body of a clown, a trickster, and a masked comic figure.

The piece features an abstracted profile of Zanni with an elongated, bird-like nose that echoes the traditional mask associated with the character. The face is built from sharp passages of ochre, black, blue, orange, red, and turquoise, giving the figure a fractured yet animated presence. An intense ochre eye looks outward at the viewer, becoming the emotional and psychological focus of the work. This eye prevents the figure from becoming purely comic. It watches, confronts, and implicates us in the performance.

The central form also reads as a kind of egg or shell, a radiantly colored abstraction held together by black line work. These lines separate the colors into distinct sections, but they also suggest cracks, fissures, and points of emergence. Zanni appears to be breaking out of the form rather than simply existing within it. This gives the work a sense of birth, rupture, and transformation. The trickster is not fixed; he is in the middle of becoming.

Bull’s use of white space is especially effective. Unlike the dense, all-over energy of some of her other abstract works, this piece allows the figure to hover in a nearly blank field. The surrounding paper becomes active through restraint. It gives the central character room to perform, while the splatters of black, gray, red, blue, and green create a feeling of sudden motion, as though Zanni has burst into view mid-act. The figure seems less placed on the page than erupted onto it.

In a distinctly Fran Bull touch of humor, a yellow bird flies into the frame with a colorful lunchtime worm. The bird complicates the seriousness of the Yeats reference, pulling the work back toward play, appetite, and earthly absurdity. If Yeats imagines the soul transcending decay through artifice and song, Bull gives us a comic bird with a worm. The gesture is funny, but not dismissive. It reminds us that spiritual longing and ridiculous embodiment often exist side by side.

What makes the Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing series unique is how sharply it diverges from the series that came before and after it. It sits like the middle layer of a three-tiered abstract birthday cake, pressed between the Sophia and Tar Pits series, which share more recognizable motifs with one another. Here, Bull gives us something distinct, vibrant, and refreshingly theatrical: an abstract expressionist work filtered through humor, performance, literary reference, and symbolic disguise.

Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Zanni ultimately becomes a portrait of transformation through play. Bull takes Yeats’s meditation on age, soul, and permanence, then runs it through the comic machinery of commedia dell’arte. The result is not a solemn image of transcendence, but a bright, fractured, laughing figure that seems to sing through splatter, color, mask, and motion. It is the soul as performer, the trickster as philosopher, and life on earth as one strange and beautiful party.

-Jonathan Flike

About the Artist
Fran Bull is an American artist whose career moves restlessly across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, performance, and installation. Originally associated with the Photorealist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, Bull gradually pushed beyond realism toward a more personal and psychologically charged visual language. Her work often exists between figuration and abstraction, using the body, myth, theatricality, and distortion as tools for exploring consciousness, memory, fear, beauty, and transformation.

Bull studied Music and Art at Bennington College and later earned a master’s degree in Art and Art Education from New York University. Her early Photorealist work was shown through Louis K. Meisel Gallery, placing her within one of the central gallery contexts for American Photorealism. Over time, however, Bull’s practice became increasingly experimental. Her ink drawings, prints, sculptural forms, and mixed-media works reveal an artist less interested in reproducing the visible world than in exposing the unstable forces beneath it.

This evolution is central to Bull’s importance. In her later work, faces fracture, bodies become theatrical vessels, and forms seem to emerge from dream, satire, ritual, and unconscious thought. Her imagery can be grotesque, humorous, spiritual, and deeply human all at once. Whether working in ink, etching, paint, or sculpture, Bull treats art as a means of passage between worlds: the seen and unseen, the ordinary and mythic, the personal and collective.

Bull has exhibited in the United States and Europe, with works connected to major phases of American Photorealism, expressionist abstraction, printmaking, and installation. For Visard, her work represents the power of artistic reinvention: a career not defined by a single style, but by an ongoing search for a freer, stranger, and more expansive visual truth.

Underrepresented Artist Information
Like many women artists of her generation, Fran Bull’s career reflects both achievement and uneven recognition within the larger art historical record. Although Bull was connected to significant artistic movements and exhibited widely across multiple decades, her work remains less visible than that of many male contemporaries who moved through similar circles of realism, abstraction, and experimental image-making.

This underrepresentation is especially important because Bull’s career resists easy categorization. She was not simply a Photorealist, nor solely an expressionist, printmaker, sculptor, or performance-based artist. Her practice evolved across mediums with intellectual restlessness and emotional force, making her body of work harder to flatten into a single market-friendly label. Visard recognizes Bull as an artist whose breadth, reinvention, and psychological depth deserve fuller documentation and continued attention. See less