LONG LOOK WORKSHOP NOTES 2011
First morning or even first full day: Finding and connecting with a subject
Do not go out in search of a composition, or a winning painting. Look instead to find a subject with which to be "available in response," as Robert Irwin has suggested.
CONCENTRATION & CONTEMPLATION
CONCENTRATION
>Bringing the mind home, or into focus and maintaining focus.
>Before finding a subject to paint: still the mind with attention on breath, walking, or passing body experience; aware of purpose at hand (finding a subject) and body.
>All other thoughts: let them go, let them go, let them go.
>You are here for the day and nowhere else. Allow other concerns to fade to the background.
>If it takes a thousand returns to the process, no problem.
>Once a subject is found (subject finds you): rest awareness on the subject, simply. Thinking falls below your alert mind. Just be with the subject.
CONTEMPLATION
>Attend. That is, wait.
>Again, keep your thinking out of it. Prior knowledge of the place, of your skills in color, design, perspective, your feelings of inadequacy or even of pride can relax here.
>Attend like waiting for an elderly aunt to finish a sentence.
>Be patient and receptive, reticent, open.
SKETCHING & STUDIES
“You cannot control, only catch.” –Tsung Tsai
SKETCHING
>a quick, spontaneous response to the subject, often catching something important that was hidden in plane sight.
>Intuitive, sketchy, imprecise.
STUDIES
>a more rigorous effort to analyze form and formal structure. The movement, energy and gesture are included here. What bends, angles, repetitions, textures, darks and lights?
>Now we are seeing. Seeing is active, full-body participation with the subject.
>What you know about form, composition, mark making, color, art history will all participate, yet:
>experience of (listening to) the subject is primary.
COLOR MIXING
>Use time mixing the colors you see as a way of coming to know the subject: “Who are you?”
>An initial response, like sketching; OR
>like truly studying the colors.
>Let her voice dominate. You are taking notation, not yet adding your two cents.
>Later you can exaggerate colors or de-saturate colors as your expression.
EBB & FLOW
>You may feel the process take on its own momentum, lead you with it.
>Don’t count on it. But it does happen.
>Then, the flow will ebb. It has to. When it does, ebb with it. Do not push.
>Take a break, and Stay Attentive.
>It will flow again when it’s time.
PURPOSEFUL DISTORTION OF FORM & COLOR
>Once a connection is established and a flow is moving, you will naturally add to the conversation.
>Expand or contract a form.
>Saturate or de-saturate a color.
>Choosing an angle or a format, or where to place the horizon is already expression.
>Composition is expression, it comes from your side of the conversation.
>While you’re at it, you can lift a hillside or lower it, push it to the right; make a tree larger, darker, yellower or leave it out; pull down the reds, push up the blues.
SEEING THROUGH MOMENTARY CONDITIONS AND CHOOSING A MOMENT
All of the above practices will help you see through the constantly changing conditions of light, shadow, wind, color, etc. let alone your own passing moods, working attention and failing attention. You will begin to see that everything in your experience is interdependent. And constantly in motion. If it were not in constant motion, it would be stuck and so would you. The whole thing is possible, painting a picture is possible, precisely because it is all constantly changing.
The subject is presenting itself through many moods. In there somewhere you will find a moment that strikes you best. Maybe more than one. For the most part, and especially early on, let them go, while you paint layer over layer on a painting of many hours. Your layering will bring depth, and you can shift the final layers to the coloring of that passing condition. It will not be a glib, spontaneous stroke of luck, but a studied and knowing expression of the mood you saw pass over the subject. (It saw itself through you.)
In a quicker painting, of one to three hours, this all may happen sooner, with fewer layers.
PAINTING IN LAYERS
>Working wet-into-wet is challenging: exciting when done well, but often going to mud.
>first layer must remain open and receptive to more layers. To whit:
>lay it down thin; physically thin, not thinned with solvent.
>lay the next layer down a bit heavier, maybe a bit oilier. Just a bit.
>each successive layer is heavier, and maybe oiler, than the previous.
>Don’t “mop the floor.”
>each new stroke is applied, then left!
>Don’t over work it!
>The brush-work should knit and weave together.
>This is your chance to make your own brush marks, even while stealing ideas from masters like Monet, Cézanne, Braque, Chatham, etc. Each has his own signature brush.
CONVENTION OR GENUINE CONNECTION
“Only Connect.” – E.M. Forster
We’ve all been more or less influenced by works of the past. We’ve studied them and wondered about them, been profoundly influenced by them. We can also see how the characteristic mark, composition or color set of these elder artists has been “stolen” by other artists. Once that artist’s way has been emulated over a generation, a convention will have developed. Looking closely at other painters and copying their work or their style is a powerful way to learn to paint. But, after a while, we risk painting only their collection of signs and marks. Then, we no longer see for ourselves. Our effort is obscured by our knowledge of other painters.
Better that we connect to our own experience. Use everything we have learned from other painters, or even musicians and composers, and make it our own through a genuine connection to the subject. Use it but change it.
Artist Statement 2008
The hills are whole and direct, honest and fully present. The sky, too, is fully present. The cloud, its shadow, the grasses and trees, are all direct and candid. The hills rise; the valleys yield. Animals have movement; they decide to go this way or that way. They are also sincere and straightforward in their being. Just watch a horse or a cat or a beetle for a while. They have marvelous intention.
But men and women are self-consciousness. We have doubt, especially about ourselves. We are empathic, and desirous and angry. And this gives rise to society and culture, government and science and art. In a word: form. I think I depend on landscape because it's direct and honest; it's larger than me and my fears. I use abstraction and pattern and symbols to gesture toward that landscape. These are human tools for understanding. Again, form. At our core, we are just as luminous as nature; we have our being in mind and heart and body.
Some of these paintings begin with my personal experience in wilderness, in what John Marin referred to as the "large forms of nature." They are reduced and concentrated to complex interrelations of shapes and colors, pattern and rhythm. There are a number of ongoing series. One series will sometimes also make reference to human forms, or the body of a great being. Another series depicts vast nature somewhat realistically, behind a scrim of language. Another reduces nature to text or pattern.
Part of the process of sublimation of its forms involves imagining the landscape (whether memory or dream, it hardly matters) in an even larger context of internal spaciousness. I use text, or a simulation of text, to offer the drone of chatter, or prayer, or chant. Repetitions are sometimes used, as in Rising Mountain – Clear Heart or River Bottom. Repetitions have to do with attention placed, and placed again, on an object. Placing attention is a method for opening the larger context of internal spaciousness. Painting or viewing landscape is another. Spending time in wilderness is another, but we don’t need special equipment to access the far interior. It is right here, all the time.
Biography
Jef Gunn is a painter, printmaker and sometimes sculptor, working in Portland, Oregon. Gunn attends to the relationship between consciousness and the phenomenal world, expressed in simple large forms of Nature drawn from memory of experience in wilderness and urban environs, concentrated into shapes, text, pattern and signs. "I don't know if I care much about self expression. In relation to the wilderness or the city, what is a self? Art is mind revealing mind."
In September 2006, he co-curated "Impulse," a national show of encaustic painting and sculpture at the Portland Art Canter. He is represented by the William Traver Gallery in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, and by Augen Gallery in Portland. Gunn has participated in many important Northwest group exhibits, such as "Grace," at the Art Gym (Marylhurst University), curated by Sarah Ellen Taylor in 2001; the "Tool Show" and "Garden Show," both curated by Paul Arensmeyer for Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (1996 and 1997, respectively). He had a painting retrospective at Oregon State University in 1995. In the late 1980s he fulfilled two residencies in Europe: la Cité International des Arts in Paris, France; and another in Barcelona, Spain, where he made studio work and exhibited at the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc and in local galleries. Gunn earned a BFA in painting from Marylhurst University in 2005. He led a group of artists on a tour of museums, galleries and artist studios in Barcelona in March 2007 and will lead other tours in Winter/Spring 2009.
Interests: Asian philosophies, history and aesthetics; 20th/ 21st century art and music; language and philology; poetry; music; mythology. Other skills: woodworking, outdoorsmanship, encaustic painting, foreign language skills (Spanish, French, learning Japanese)
I grew up in the 50s and 60s, along the West Coast from Seattle and Portland to Pasadena and Honolulu. Learned to paint in the 70s in Central California; moved back to the NW for the light and a crazy love for damp and darkness. Over that now; I really rather like it on the East side of the state and other sunny places. Extended periods of study in both Barcelona and Paris in the 1980s had a strong hand in developing my methods of painting and understanding of art. All that has been leavened by attitudes and practices of pre-modern Asian art : Sung to Ming dynasties in China; Kamakura to Edo to Meiji periods in Japan. These painters were modern before the West knew what it meant.
Si usted desea cualquiera información en Español, favor de escribirnos a
info@jefgunn.com.
CV [.pdf]
Yes
Yes, well,
What is central?
A correspondence:
the shape and texture
taken by a mind
a hand
a dream
like the movement of
a space
or a large form
beyond my understanding
or ability.
The folds of rock and water
correspond
to feeling shapes
in my being
or human forms
presences and
absences
wishing
remembering.