Bernard Bolter

The Globalist

House of Life

Education

What is the 'birth of civilization' if not everything.

Antiquity

An invented, ghost-white Acropolis beneath a Turner-inspired vortex of a sun, painted in a San Francisco backyard at the close of a self-taught period.

Trees

Self Portrait 1995

Fisheye self-portrait, oil on canvas, painted on the artist's 21st birthday from a hill in the SF backyard, with San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge (visible as a thin red structure) across the water.

Renoir Study

Nietzche's Dream

A statue of two stacked figures — red above, green below — stands on a cliffside plateau overlooking the Pacific, the upper figure pointing out past the edge beneath a Turner-like burning sky.

Intentions

Fiddler on a Roof

Color Theory

An imagined San Francisco landscape testing Goethe's warm/cool color theory for the first time, with the young artist himself reading beneath a tree.

Color Pyramid

Color Collumns

Canvas

ABstract

The End

A narrow panoramic oil painting of a figure walking along a lagoon-side walkway toward a guillotine, under a Turner-inspired sunset sky.

The Way to LA

The Sunset

A painting of the actual backyard view in the Sunset District of San Francisco where all the OG oil paintings were made — the vantage point itself, not an invented scene. Painted from underneath a bedroom that jutted out from the house, which offered shelter from the rain.

The Stage

Painted around the same time as Space Time (1993-94) as part of a short-lived figure-testing experiment not carried forward stylistically. Loosely informed by Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy — the Apollonian/Dionysian split — read around the time of painting. The artist frames the scene not as violence depicted but as something reenacted or performed on a stage: a formal containment of raw force, consistent with the Apollonian move of giving shape to the Dionysian. The direct Nietzsche reference recurs later in a separate work, Nietzsche's Dream.

Self Portrait 1994

A self portrait about the blurry line of existence.

Rite of Spring

Outside

Nature vs Nurture

Cross's

Corner

Color Vortex

After Turner

The Thinker

To make a finished, ambitious painting very early in a self-taught practice — testing perspective (the 'hero shot' upward/vanishing-point angle, felt as related to skate-video fisheye) and landscape construction in the same piece, while reinterpreting Rodin's The Thinker through an invented, Giacometti-like elongation.

Altar of Ignorance

Space Time

A one-line, flat figure loops from foot to hand to foot across a green and navy field, its hand reaching into an invented wooden trellis rendered in perspective — the only dimensional element in an otherwise flat painting.

Self Portrait 1993

Oil on raw, self-stretched canvas, painted in a covered backyard in San Francisco's Sunset District on the artist's birthday in 1993. A surreal self-portrait: an oversized head wearing a baseball hat, a single sideways eye, a disembodied hand on a windowsill, and a green sky with tree branches beyond the grey interior. The first in a birthday self-portrait ritual that continued for three years.