JEF GUNN

Hessong Rock II, oil on canvas, 25.5 x 21.5 in, 2021, Puyallup Land

October 1st - 31st

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 2nd,  4 - 5:30 pm

Artist Talk will be a video interview available by 10/8

Left: The Way Home, monotype on ives BFK, 34 x 21.5 in, 2010 Wenatchee and Yakima Land

Right: The Coming of Autumn, oil on canvas, 49.5 x 25.5 ", 2021, Referencing the ink painting by Hong Ren, 17th century

i.e. is pleased to welcome Jef Gunn for this solo installation of his new work :  Stone and Light.
 

Stone and Light

It has a lot to do with patience. On the studio wall is a piece of paper:

quiet

soft

noble

sad

not firm

not weak

no sleight of hand

frank

joy

love

Today and for some decades now rock, stone, land – leaders in patience – have drawn my attention. A drawing or painting is like a greeting. A wave or a bow across space. The appeal is its own answer.
Painting is a fluid art that presents as static. Time flows past this moment while the painting is still seeing and giving.
 



Jef Gunn Biography

I was born in Seattle when it smelled of cedar and low tide. I moved back to Seattle in 1980 for the rain (really) and because of paintings I had seen at the Francine Seders Gallery (by Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and others). My Aunt Helyn, Dad’s sister, had brought me there when I was 14. A cousin has said that Aunt Helyn and Uncle Jack had known Tobey and Graves. I didn’t understand their work, but when around them my inner life awakened with memories of my boyhood in the region of Puget Sound. There is a great spirit alive in the Sound. I have lived up and down the West Coast and now make my home in Portland.
Legend has it my maternal grandfather was born under the floorboards during an Indian raid in 1890s Saskatchewan. Granny hailed from the Borders of Scotland and was more than a little fey.  My dad’s father was a welder, a Choctaw-Scot from Alabama who worked on bridges and who won the hand of a southern belle in Mississippi. In the 1920s they moved their brood of six to a logging camp near Spirit Lake on Mount St. Helens.
Both my parents had outsized personalities: Dad was an adman/radio man and mom was a charming lass from northern Manitoba, and later Vancouver. They met and married in dreamy 1950s Honolulu. (Mom said she dated the great steel guitarist Barney Isaacs before settling on Dad!) I began this life there in Honolulu, and the sounds and smells of the Islands still run through me.
I studied drawing and painting in California through the 1970s, held residencies in Barcelona and Paris in the 1980s, and since the mid 1990s have engaged in a passionate study of Asian art. I began using encaustic in 1985, inspired by a painting by Joseph Goldberg. This was long before there were any books or classes on it. With encaustic, I can bring together all of my other methods: oils, papers and inks, fabric, tar, and gold. The work I do draws on multiple lineages of art, culture and spiritual meaning.


The  prints in the exhibit were done on a residency at Crow’s Shadow Institute of Arts on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon. They have never been shown. I'd like to acknowledge the tribes of the Coastal Pacific Northwest when I travel through and paint these lands they once held.