(mellow string music)
- So I'm going to fill this with ink,
but I'm really interested in accidents.
I just found this the other day.
It's a broken piece of concrete
that was hard up against the post of a fence,
and then this broke out,
and it has a very interesting shape.
And I'll take an ink impression of it.
It's almost like an object was silent,
and now it has a voice.
Reminds me of lungs.
This is a head of a sledgehammer.
Here's a snake that I found
that was all dried up under a board.
And I inked it and printed it over and over
until it fell to pieces.
I'm Jef Gunn, and I'm an artist.
(gentle piano music)
We remodeled an old church into our new temple,
and we completely tore out the old furnace.
And this was underneath the furnace.
Kinda crooked.
This piece of iron made those impressions right there.
On the left side, moving up, come morning.
On the right side, moving down, come evening.
I was always interested in art.
I didn't know it was art.
I was always drawing, always drawing.
My earliest memories were drawing.
I discovered that there were artists when I was 13.
We had a new stepdad,
and the stepdad had books, and bookshelves full of books.
He bought everything that Time-Life published.
And there was a book on Rembrandt.
I didn't know what it was.
I just pulled out a book and opened it up,
and it was like a mutual recognition.
And then I took out the book on Goya,
and I copied Goya, and Velazquez.
I copied most of their drawings.
I knew at that moment that I was an artist.
I mean, I just knew that I was one of those guys.
They do that. I do that.
It was as simple as that.
- I like Jef Gunn's work.
That's why we represent him.
And the encaustics have a completely different feel
than the oil paintings.
(soft woodwind music)
They have a very Zen kind of quality to them.
- Encaustics really labor intensive.
(dramatic piano music)
Sometimes I start with tar as my base,
or some other strange surface.
And then I put pigments in water and smear them on,
or pigments in wax and paint with them.
(dramatic orchestra music)
I'm pouring hot molten wax medium.
Apply the wax. Scrape that off.
Apply more wax. Scrape that off.
- Painting in encaustic is painting
with translucent colors, not opaque colors.
And so you basically are able to see
the painting that you made five minutes ago
underneath the painting that you're making right now.
- I'm going to fuse it in.
(dramatic orchestra music)
Okay, so that's fused in.
I'm gonna let that cool just a bit.
(dramatic orchestra music)
I'm going to use a furniture scraper
to smooth out all the high spots.
(mellow acoustic music)
I just came upon this spontaneously
on a painting sometime ago.
And if I keep this us up in this spot,
it's going to get real relaxed and fall apart,
and let that beautiful orange come through.
And it'll crack in its own pattern, which is great.
There's a lot of anticipated consequences.
I'm pulling up pigment from below.
But more often than that,
there's a surprise to be dealt with.
Either a total kerfuffle, like this isn't gonna work,
or I changed my plans, or I burn a hole in it.
So it's not difficult to imagine
30 hours on a painting like that.
(mellow acoustic music)
That's really just the beginning,
but it lays the bones of this piece that I have in mind.
I actually might extend this form a little bit.
My thinking on this is a rock just off the ocean.
There's a certain loneliness in the quality that I'm after.
Sometimes you have ideas for the painting.
The painting has other ideas,
and it fights back,
and says no, no, we're not gonna do that.
And then you have to have a talk with it
and ask it nicely to do what you want.
Sometimes you have to curse at it.
Sometimes you have to just tell it to go sit in a corner
for 10 years.
I made a devotion to landscape some many years ago,
like in the '90s.
I decided I'm just gonna focus on land, sky, water.
(exotic string music)
I went to Barcelona
because I wanted to live in a country that spoke Spanish.
Barcelona is like electric.
I was influenced by a lot of things there,
but especially by the Romanesque art
up at the National Museum of Catalan Art,
and they're wildly crazy, fluid, abstract.
And then on the other extreme was Antoni Tapies.
It had an immediacy that just shocked me.
I really love the spontaneity,
and the in your face of the graffiti in Barcelona.
Graffiti everywhere has that effect,
but there was some graffiti that was really artful.
Someone had written all these ancient phrases.
(reflective piano music)
(water splashing)
There's an awareness that the moment is passing,
and that what we captured was this moment.
(reflective violin music)
There's something about that the time moves all the time,
and paintings don't move.
There's a strange mystery in that.
And there's a sadness in it.
It's like a nostalgia kind of sadness,
but there's a joy in it.
It's the play between those two.