Gavin Bunner

Gavin Bunner was born 1/17/1983 in Peoria Il, He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Illinois State University in December of 2005.

Mini Gallery

← 1 2 3 4 5 6 →

works on LPP

Track Team Print

Fat Man Holding Popsicle Print

Gavin Bunner letterpress print

★ MEET N‘ GREET ★
Gavin Bunner

Cortney Cassidy interviews Gavin Bunner

Where are you currently living and how does your present environment inspire your creativity?

I am currently living in downtown Los Angeles. It’s the fourth place I have lived in the last year, so I am currently in a frequent moving stage, but that’s okay because my work isn’t really inspired my actual physical (1) surroundings. So long as I have an internet connection the work will just keep coming out of me.

Tell us about your creative process and how has your process matured or evolved since you began drawing/painting? Were they conscious developments or was it an underlying progression?

I began like everybody else, with the goal of drawing being to realistically depict life. Once that became really easy to do; the question was then, well, what do you do with that skill. To be honest, I still have no idea what you can do with it directly; however I still think it is the most important thing I learned, since it taught me color, form, and composition, which is the foundation of all visual art making.

What put my work on track to where it is now, the big explosion, happened really quickly at the start of 2005: however, the build up started about a year before, when I decided that I was going make work that better suited (2) my personality, or in other words, to start making work that was funny. At the start I had said I was going to make the “Spinal Tap” (3) of art with my new art movement “Humorism”. So I wrote a manifesto in the third person and began to switch my direction toward that goal and away from making an attempt to be “Serious”. Looking back on it, all early Humorism led to was a lot of cartoons. It wasn’t until about a year later, when I took Advanced Drawing class that I started to spin Humorism in a more profound (4) direction.

Part of the first assignment, for the class, was to find ten (5) images and make a composition with them at the scale you found them. This led to two big breakthroughs as I decided to use Google Image search (6) to find the pictures, and then decided it is stupid to draw a picture of photograph, and since they are going to be the same size in the end, I might as well trace them. Thus the first of the “Hatercolors” (7) was born as a sketch for the project. I then made 250 of them before the start of the fall semester, but I had noticed a future problem with them, in that you had to see about ten (8) of them at once to really understand what I was doing. So I decided I was going to start making genres, like in the “Where’s Waldo” (9) books, with my narratives in a larger scene. Thus the “Gouache Bombs” came about as a way to increase the paintings interactivity with the audience, and so that I could show just one painting and have people understand what I’m doing. The first Goauche bomb also marked the official death (10) of Humorism, as I began to realize my paintings were about more then just humor.

There have been several times where I had thought that the Gouache Bombs had run their course, and I had stopped making them and started working on other series. What always happens is the ideas from the other series eventually end up mixing with the Gouache Bombs, creating a new direction for the Gouache Bombs to go (11) in. The most important such combination was with the “Fulk” series and led to the all over compositions and the interior scenes.

I would say, as whole, my work has tended to make large jumps (12) almost overnight, followed by months of refinement before another big change; however the jumps have been mainly formal for the last couple years as my concept hasn’t changed in that time.

What is your typical creative protocol? Do you have any quirky routines or habits that you must perform before getting into your creative groove?

I just treat making art like a regular job: I do a lot of research, keep fairly regular hours and set goals for how fast I should be making a painting, but I will always stress quality over quantity; if I don’t make goal, that’s fine with me as long as the end result was worth it. If I get stuck on a painting I just put it to the side and work on another one. I typically have three to five paintings in some state of production at one time. My only real quirk, I suppose, is sometimes I go on a bicycle ride if I get totally stuck. Something about those endorphins really makes the brain kick; although sometimes I overdue (13) it and am too tired to really do anything afterward, and sometimes I blow (14) a tire and spend all day walking back.

Do you normally have a well thought out plan before diving into a project or is it the opposite for you?

I usually just start with the genre the painting is going to be, for example Forest, and then I Google Image search the hell out of it, looking up things that I associate with forests and things that I discover while searching for those, or just doing a generic image search of the word “Forest” (15). I then trace in the background images, in this case trees, in pencil, and then layout out the narratives I made from the foreground pictures (a.k.a. people). I then perfect the narratives and the composition until they are the same as Bob Segers hit song from 1986 (16). Lastly, I then Sharpie in the outlines and color in the whole thing. So I guess you could say I have a well thought out plan.

I see many allusions to historical imagery, events and other more contemporary recognizable icons/elements in your works. Are these satirical studies on these subjects or have you been inspired by their visual impact?

There is nothing Satirical (17) in work. A lot of the icons I use are people or things that I am a fan of, but I also love the level of audience interaction that using icons can produce, when people start picking through my painting for things they recognize.

The icons are also important conceptually in the way they are used. If Pop Art in the sixties was about studying a single icons impact (18), Pop art today is about studying the impact of several icons interacting together, and also interacting with non-icons. If you think about it, it is really a reflection of our current culture at large, where you have celebrities and non-celebrities interacting on reality television, M.A.S.H. is still on TV, coming on right after 24, and the internet allows every fan of something to easily put together their own webpage (19) about it (preferably with a lot of pictures).

What other bits and pieces of life inspire your work? What motivates you or better yet, what makes you tick?

Really it is my friends and family. There all a pretty fun bunch and the more fun I am having in life, the more fun I’m having in painting; thus making better paintings.

I find that your use of space is very creative and intriguing, how do you wish for your viewers to perceive your play with perspective and negative space? What is your ultimate goal with these compositional tools?

Since there is no hierarchal, main, narrative in my paintings (instead there is a series of narratives related to the scene, but not necessarily each other), the negative space is used to keep the composition of the painting static (20), so that the viewer can pause on the individual narratives and wander through the painting at their own pace.

In the early painting I achieved the static composition by using a lot of negative space at the top of painting to compress everything into roughly the bottom third or fifth of the painting, and scene scrolled from left to right.

After I became bored with that layout, I started with two new ones, the tall and skinny, and the all over composition. The tall and skinny came about after experiments with the collaborative group John Rainbow (21), where we were seeing how many times we could getting a paintings’ composition to fold, most paintings fold into thirds, but we got one to fold into sevenths by making it tall and skinny. I then brought this idea back into the gouache work and started making tall and skinny gouache bombs. They are still static, due to amount of negative space between figures, but are read more from top to bottom. The all over compositions are basically the tall and skinny composition fattened up, but without the narrowness of the other compositions the viewers eye is able to wander more up and down.

If you wouldn’t mind, could you fill us in on any current and upcoming projects you have in the works?

My next Solo Show opens in February, and will feature the most awesome performance art spectacle involving cardboard (22), people (23), candy (24), vinegar and baking soda (25). The tentative title is “the BerenstainBares vs. Moby Dick’s Ass Wind” and it will raise the bar on opening night gimmicks to level beyond the typical art opening fare of free booze (26), a shitty dj (27), and a skate ramp (28). I say bring on the era of stupid.

What are your personal theories/thoughts on the contemporary art world? Where its heading, how has it been, or how you would like it to be? Do you express these ideals through your art?

I see three trends going on at the moment that I really like. There’s a new breed of abstract painters who are experimenting with ways of basically manufacturing paintings (Dan Mrva). You’ve got a movement of people who using found materials to make really poetic works (Adam Farcus (29), Bill Conger (30)). Then there is the new wave of pop art: the idiosyncratic illustrator waking up after a culture bender (Alison Byrnes (31), me). These are the only three trends I see that are able relate to a mainstream audience at the same time they are expanding lineages in art history. They are as relatable as they are relevant.

Thank you Gavin for being part of Little Paper Press with your limited edition print.

Gavin Bunner

Mini Gallery

works on LPP

★ MEET N‘ GREET ★ Gavin Bunner

★ MEET N‘ GREET ★
Gavin Bunner