Will Bullas

Will Bullas (American, b. 1949) is the rare fine artist who sets out, first and foremost, to make people laugh. Born in Ohio and raised in the Southwest, he was studying art and drama on scholarship at Arizona State University when he was drafted into the Vietnam War — where his first "commissions" were pencil portraits of fellow soldiers to send home. Returning to civilian life, he earned a degree in oil painting at the Brooks Institute of Fine Art in Santa Barbara, studying under landscape master Ray Strong, and there met his wife and fellow artist, Claudia. The couple settled in Carmel, California, the seaside art colony he still calls home.

Wit, Watercolor & the Animal Pun

Bullas works chiefly in watercolor — a notoriously unforgiving medium where there is no painting over a mistake — to create whimsical animal characters paired with sly visual puns and one-line titles. The model may be a frog, a flamingo, or a fat cat, but the subject is unmistakably human: vanity, ambition, romance, and folly, gently skewered. The craft underneath the comedy is serious, and his control of the medium is total.

Collecting Will Bullas

A signature member of both the American and National Watercolor Societies, he received the American Watercolor Society's Mario Cooper & Dale Meyers Medal in 2007. His good-natured wit has made his signed, limited-edition prints among the most collected of any contemporary humorist — art that earns a smile every time you pass it.