Exploring the Relationship Between Painting and Photography

“This illusion is intentional,” says Professor of Art Mullen. “I aim to explore the relationship between painting and photography, with an emphasis on how we represent a sense of place. These works contrast iconic representations of well-known sites with images generated by my visits to those same sites.”

Mullen’s work is being featured in an upcoming show at First Street Gallery, an artist-run space now in its fiftieth year of staging exhibitions in New York City.

The exhibition, titled “Thresholds,” kicks off on October 29 and runs through November 22, 2025, with an opening reception being held on October 30. It is supported by a Faculty Research Award that Mullen received this past spring.

 “I am extremely excited to have the opportunity to share my work in the middle of the exhibition season in such a dynamic setting,” says Mullen.

“Thresholds” is composed primarily of paintings created in the last two years, he explains, with the addition of several earlier pieces that set the foundation for this new work. The exhibition contains eighteen different pieces, ranging from sixteen by twelve inches up to forty by sixty inches

Mullen says the show represents a more refined focus on issues that have circulated in his work for the last decade. “He is drawn to photography's capacity for both documentation and creating visual meaning, contrasting it with painting's unique ability to embody accumulated experience, time, and the human touch,” says the gallery in a press release.

Now in his twenty-fifth year at Bowdoin teaching in the visual arts department, Mullen has taught a range of courses, with an emphasis on painting and drawing. He has received more than twenty-five different awards, residencies, and fellowships, staged more than twenty solo exhibitions, and participated in over eighty-five juried exhibitions since receiving tenure in 2006. He lives and works in Portland, Maine.