Jef Gunn | Moving : Stilling at Traver Gallery

Featuring more than 25 artworks, the paintings in this show feature a unique blend of materials, including paper, ink, fabric, tar, and gold. Gunn's diverse application materials, combined with spontaneous brushwork, large swathes of bold colors, and thick, courageously applied textures, reveal a particular insight into the relationship between landscape and abstraction that Gunn uniquely observes. A practicing Buddhist, Gunn's art-making process centers on the closely observed. Whether the starting point is a broad sweeping landscape or a spilled coffee on his studio floor, materials, mark-making, and meditation are essential to his methodology. In his landscape paintings, bold shapes and colors often reference landforms—hills, rivers, lakes, or skies—each carrying a symbolic significance. In his abstract encaustic works, marks borrowed from accidental moments and found elements refer obliquely to lakes, rivers, and stones. The artist's profound connection to nature and his deliberate journey of making bring poetic and unexpected relationships to life within his paintings. Jef Gunn was born in Seattle in 1955 and grew up along the West Coast, from Puget Sound and Portland to Southern California and Hawaii. He studied drawing and painting in California through the 1970s, held residencies in Barcelona and Paris in the 1980s, and, since the mid-1990s, has engaged in a passionate study of Asian art. Gunn has taught since 1996 at Pratt Fine Art Center in Seattle, Oregon College of Art and Craft and, Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, and Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Please join us for the opening reception of this exhibition on June 6th from 5-8 pm. The show will be on view through June 29th. Gallery Hours: Tue-Friday 10-6 pm Saturdays 10-5 pm

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2447844-0

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