Edward Bullmore hailed from Balfour, Southland. He attended Canterbury University College, Christchurch, with Pat Hanly and Bill Culbert. Having taught at Tauranga Boys’ College in the late 1950s he headed to Florence, with his wife and fellow artist, Jacqueline. The Bullmores spent six months in Italy and then in early 1960 relocated to London, staying until the end of 1969. During that time, Bullmoe taught at various art schools, and exhibited widely, attracting critical attention from the art world. Amongst collectors of his work from this era was filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who featured two of Bullmore’s works in A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Bullmore spent a decade in London where he taught and exhibited. He made his solo debut at London’s Tama Galleries, with his shaped canvases, and later in 1967 in Exeter exhibiting in a Surrealist exhibition, The Enchanted Domain. Bullmore returned to New Zealand in late 1969 taking up a teaching position atRotorua Boys’ High School. The Cuba Crisis Series offer scenes of morbidity – grotesque and raw both in subject and how Bullmore executed them. It was not until Bullmore reached London that political crises affected his art and thus changed his way of seeing the external world, and most particularly the landscape.