A Place and Space for Art
In my underworld
I have many interests — too many I sometimes think. After a long academic career, I enjoyed a second full career as a magazine writer and editor. Along the way, I continued a passion for photography. My photos have been included in exhibits, featured in a National Park Service calendar, and published in books and magazines. And I garden. And I paint.
My art studio is a room under our north terrace. The house is on a narrow mountain ridge and is built on two levels, so the studio on the lower level has large windows on two sides and opens to a garden. I share the “basement” with the walls of our pool, a small bathroom, an exercise room, storage space, and Gamby, our “outside” cat, who spends the night inside.
I began painting as a teenager — my best friend, an artist, was my first teacher. I took electives in drawing as an undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico. After a forty-year hiatus (I was studying, teaching, raising a family, following other passions, and experiencing a new career in San Juan), I began painting again.
Two things precipitated it. One was a friend who introduced me to acrylics. I had only painted with oils and soon became interested in the medium. The other was the carriage house in a colonial building in Old San Juan my wife and I rented to avoid the long commute from our country home. Its walls were white, high, and empty. We could not afford to buy art, but the solution was clear. I would do it myself! The largest canvas we could fit in our car was 3' by 4', so that became my format.
I painted the things I saw around me while at our country home on weekends. My art is decorative, not complex, not emotive, nothing unique other than it's a glimpse of nature through the prism of my eyes.
Above are two of the early paintings that now hang in our living room in the country — we gave up the place in San Juan after retirement. Both are of varieties of my favorite tropical plants in my garden, the heliconias.
The Heliconia Rostrata is a newer work. I found a supply of oil paints during a closeout sale in San Juan and painted a series of works with them, including this one. The others I sold during my one and only public exhibition a few years ago.
The breadfruit painting was a result of my getting up very early one morning and seeing the red blaze of dawn behind a tree. Both paintings are now in our kitchen — they make cooking brighter!
We have run out of wall space. These are among about a dozen of my paintings in our dining room. I show them in place to give a sense of their size — they really take over! The one on the right is a collection of gazanias that I once grew (before Hurricane Maria wiped them out). I planned to paint separate canvases, but decided I was incapable of putting them all together in one frame without messing them up, so I used a single 36" x 48" canvas. The smaller pop-art portrait is of my wife and the Travelers’ Palm on the far left is an early work.
I went through a brief abstract expressionist period and this is one of the results. My idea was to capture a butterfly in motion, fluttering. It now flutters in a hallway. Our nearby town has a good frame shop that did a fine job of mounting the four canvases together.
Our cats sleep in our sunroom, and these are two of the many paintings there. I’m not sure if they like them or not! The creek painting (actually four small ones) was inspired by a day I hiked in a nature park while visiting our daughter in Georgia.
I did some paintings of maracas, another plant in the Zinziberales family found on our land. I was playing with some heavier acrylics inspired by something I saw in a magazine and wanted to try large areas of basic colors. I only did two: perhaps too bold and boring!
Here you can see my first maracas painting and above it one of the early canvases I painted for the place in Old San Juan. The croton (Codiaeum variegatum) was next to our old wooden deck, a bush that was swept away by a storm, but immortalized in acrylics in my painting. Fire in the Forest at the top of the stairs is one of the expressionistic paintings I created with oils.
Finally (there are a lot more, but enough is enough!), here is a small print of a large painting I sold during my show. It is one of several now in private collections.
I am not a serious artist, of course, but I am a person who attempts to capture a version of the natural beauty I find around me. My studio is the space where I try to make it happen.
Author’s note: Want to see my pandemic paintings? Here’s the link:
https://rcfgunkle.medium.com/pandemic-paintings-e9843e544743
Curious about my published fiction, poetry, or essays? You can browse my archive HERE.