A Portrait of an Intuitive Artist

Art has long been a personal outlet for Bull’s Jaime Lee Kirchner. Now she’s sharing it with the world and using her sixth sense to help others.

- By Dan Allen

As investigator Danny James on the hit drama Bull, Jaime Lee Kirchner uses her keen intuition to catch bad guys. But off-screen, Kirchner taps into her sixth sense for a greater good—creating meaningful art.

“It’s very specific, like a craving that comes over you or a call that you have to answer,” says Kirchner of the moment an intuitive spark lights her creative process. “There’s this feeling that you have to give yourself the time and the space to let your creativity come through.”

The roots of both her artistry and her acting stretch back to Kirchner’s youth in Clarksville, Tennessee. “I always expressed myself visually, even as a kindergartener,” she says. “I was also very chatty, so the origins of acting basically came at the same time.” She eventually studied theater at New York University, but she was never formally trained in art. “For a long time, art was the only thing I had that was my own and that wasn’t scripted,” she says.

Around 12 years ago, Kirchner started working with a spiritual guide named Astrid Moore, who helped her with her creative process. “She allows me to look at things from a different eye, so to speak, and to see things that are helpful to me or my subject,” says Kirchner. Bull fans might spot in this a fitting bit of kismet—last year in the show’s fourth season, writers unwittingly gave Dr. Bull’s new daughter the name Astrid. “We kind of joke about how that came through,” Kirchner says with a laugh. “Of all the names, Astrid— how many Astrids do you know?”