Dan Bulleit took a stroll through the Brown County Art Gallery about six years ago and admired the works of art hanging on the walls.
A thought went through his mind: Wouldn’t it be nice to have his own artwork hanging on this gallery’s walls one day?
After decades of delay, Bulleit picked up his brush once again and began to paint.
His painting “Blue Angel,” depicting an exhausted nurse leaning against a wall with a mask in hand, now hangs on the gallery’s wall after the Indiana Heritage Arts Board selected it to become a part of its permanent collection. It is currently on display in the gallery’s lobby.
Bulleit painted the portrait while in art therapy during one of his chemotherapy sessions.
“Distractions are very helpful,” Bulleit said.
He is battling stage four colon cancer after being diagnosed in 2018.
“Life has been totally different since then,” he said.
He is currently receiving his 28th round of chemo. “After the first four, I said, ‘There’s no way I can do this.’ It makes you so incredibly disoriented and sick. You feel like an alien. It’s just nasty stuff. It was also my chance at staying alive,” Bulleit said.
Bulleit was also diagnosed with thyroid cancer around five years ago, but that is gone now. The colon cancer is not connected to that.
Since his diagnosis, Bulleit has been encouraging everyone around him to get a colonoscopy. With that push, he said over 100 people have had screenings, including his own brother, whose results were precancerous.
With a cancer diagnosis comes many appointments, anxiety and depression, he explained. The last couple of years brought major operations, including once when Bulleit coded and his family was called in to say their goodbyes.
“The doctor said, ‘I don’t think he’s going to pull out,’ but I did,” he said.
To say Bulleit has had nurses and healthcare workers who have influenced him during his health battles is an understatement. “It seemed to me I just had one great healthcare worker after another. They were just phenomenal to me,” he said.
“They made such a huge difference. They just kept getting better and better. I have a huge respect for them, so that’s another reason I did that (the painting) as a tribute to them.”
The other reason Bulleit painted this tribute is that health care workers are on the frontlines of another battle this year with COVID-19.
Bulleit was on the internet when he came across several photographs of nurses and other health care workers working in the pandemic. The strongest images were the solitary ones, because there were no other distractions, he said.
His next door neighbor just became a nurse, too, so the decision was made for his next piece of art. “I got my neighbor to pose in front of my garage door and waited for the light to be just right,” Bulleit said.
What came from that was a multi-award-winning piece. “Blue Angel” also won IHA’s People’s Choice award — his third People’s Choice award since he began entering the exhibition.
“’Blue Angel’ is an amazing painting. It is not only technically excellent, but it connects emotionally,” IHA Board President Michael Fulton said.
“It captures the dedication, commitment and exhaustion of the front line health care heroes.”
In years to come, visitors to the gallery will see that painting and remember the challenges the country faced — and ultimately overcame — in 2020 with the help of these angels, Fulton said.
Hold on to hope
Since 2014, IHA, a not-for-profit organization, has purchased outstanding art works for its permanent collection. The collection can be seen in three public places: the Brown County Community Foundation and the Brown County Art Gallery in Nashville, and the lobby and library of the West Baden Springs Hotel in West Baden.
The 42nd IHA Annual Exhibition and Sale opened to the public in October with more than 100 artworks on display at the Brown County Art Gallery. All pieces were for sale.
The IHA encourages Hoosier artists working in the tradition of the Brown County Art Colony founded by T.C. Steele, dubbed the “father” of the rich art heritage begun in the early 1900s in Brown County.
Bulleit lives in Greenville not far from Louisville, Kentucky, but he lists Steele as one of his inspirations on his website.
Bulleit graduated from the Colorado Institute of Art after receiving a scholarship, which resulted in him leaving Indiana University, where he was studying the fine arts, to move to Colorado. After college, Bulleit worked as an art director and graphic artist. His first love was illustrations. He met many famous illustrators, including Bernie Fuchs who was an influence on him.
“I was so, so poor at the time I got out of school that I took the first job I could get, so I was hired as a graphic artist to do some illustration occasionally. It went from there and I was pretty much a graphic artist for many years and an art director,” he said.
He went more than 30 years without painting. Occasionally, for agencies he was working with, he would do water media illustrations, but he focused on what made money. “I guess it terrified me to think I had to make a living. No. 1, I had a family, and I knew I had to make money so we could survive,” he said.
“I said, ‘Well, I’ll paint at night or weekends or something,’ but I never did. The job took way too much more than 40 hours a week. The last thing I wanted to do was come home and force myself to paint. I wanted to see my kids and my family.”
Occasionally, he would paint small portraits for family and friends as gifts, but that was the extent of his painting for years, until he walked into the Brown County Art Gallery during a visit to Nashville around six years ago.
Since then, Bulleit has entered paintings into the IHA exhibition. His paintings won awards in 2016, 2017 and 2018. For his first exhibition, Bulleit submitted two paintings and both were purchased. His paintings have also been purchased from previous IHA exhibitions.
For this year’s show, Bulleit entered three pieces and all three were juried in, then also purchased. The three paintings were either started or completed during his art therapy while he was receiving chemo. He also painted a fourth piece, which he gave to a friend.
Fulton said it is unusual for an artist to enter the maximum three paintings and then sell all three. Allen Hutton, a Nashville watercolor artist, also entered three pieces and sold all three this year along with receiving an award, he said.
“There are some big-time artists there and they are good,” Bulleit said about the exhibition.
Bulleit said he was not sure how people would react to “Blue Angel.” He showed the painting to nurses in his life, including his neighbor, who all liked it. “It seemed to have a big impact,” he said.
Then, Bulleit said he received the call from Fulton, letting him know that the IHA voted it into its permanent collection.
“It was very humbling. I was very, very happy to get it. That will always be there now,” he said.
Bulleit said that hope is the theme of “Blue Angel,” which is a central connection for everyone, from people battling cancer to health care workers battling a pandemic.
“We were so filled with so much negative news this year. These people risk their lives and they run into fires and try to put them out. A lot of them don’t come out of them. All I can do is paint, and they save lives,” Bulleit said.
“I am in awe of what they do, so it just seemed to be that hope is your last refuge. You need to protect it and you hold onto it as long as you can. Cancer patients, or with any chronic illness like that, if you can’t muster up hope, you’re gone. Hope is part of that, and I think they instill hope, healthcare workers. And they try to hold on to it for themselves.”
