Jef Gunn

I was born in Seattle in 1955. We moved around a lot: Honolulu, Lake Oswego, Vancouver, Seattle again, Pasadena. In 1975, my first real studio was a one car garage in Santa Cruz. Next, in 1980, a large bedroom in Berkeley. Both had stupendous views!

On a visit to Seattle when I was 14, my Aunt Helyn brought me to the Francine Seders Gallery, where I saw the works of Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and others. She also brought me to the studio of her older sister, Aunt Ruth. This day had an enormous impact on me. I never saw them again; they both died the following year. Once, years later, as I was leaving my Aunt Mary’s home, I pointed to one of Ruth’s paintings and said I think about this painting all the time. A large watercolor of rock and water, loose, abstract and yet real. “Well, you’d better take it then!” It’s still on my office wall.

I studied drawing and painting in California through the 1970s, held extended 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 around 1983, having seen an encaustic painting by Joseph Goldberg. This was before there were any books or classes on it. I looked it up in Ralph Meyer’s Handbook of Artists’ Materials and Techniques and did the best I could with it. I made up my own methods, some of which failed. With encaustic, I can bring together all of my other methods: oils, papers and inks, fabric, tar, and gold. In any medium, my work draws on multiple lineages of art, culture and spiritual meaning. I finally got around to earning a BFA in 2005, and had a show that year at Traver Gallery, Tacoma.

My first show with the Traver Sutton Gallery was in 1990. From that show, the Quarter saw Gallery in Portland took an interest and I showed there until they closed in 2000. I became familiar with many in the Portland art community and moved there in 1998. In September 2006, I curated “Impulse,” a national show of encaustic painting and sculpture at the Portland Art Center. I’ve participated in group exhibits at the Art Gym (Marylhurst University) and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and had a solo show at Oregon State University in 1995. I have taught painting and drawing in Seattle and Portland since the middle 1990s. In 2007, I led a group of artists on a tour of museums, galleries and artist studios in Barcelona. I was nominated for the 2013 Northwest Artist Awards. You can see my paintings at the Traver Gallery in Seattle, at i.e. gallery in Edison, WA., at Cedar Street Galleries in Honolulu, and at Augen Gallery in Portland, Oregon. And soon, at Gallery MAR in Carmel, California.