“I paint, ostensibly, landscape. What I am painting is mind. Mind in perpetual contact with phenomena, always in motion. From the ephemera of mind, from this existing/not existing, a love and adoration and gratitude glows like the sun. Everything is held together by this love. That’s all I know to do; to hold everything dear.”
Jef Gunn was born in Seattle in 1955 and grew up along the West Coast from Puget Sound to Southern California to 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. In 2005 Gunn completed a BFA in painting from Marylhurst University. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches painting in workshops in monotype printing, oil painting and other creative pursuits through First Light Studio, his own Portland-based operation. He is represented by Augen Gallery in Portland, and by the William Traver Gallery in Seattle and by Cedar Street Gallery in Honolulu. Gunn has participated in many interesting group exhibits, such as “Grace,�? at the Art Gym (Marylhurst University), curated by Sarah Ellen Taylor (2001); the “Tool Show�? and “Garden Show,�? both curated by Paul Arensmeyer for Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (1996 and 1997, respectively). He had a painting retrospective at Oregon State University in 1995. He taught drawing and painting in the Continuing Education program at Pacific Northwest College of Art from 1998 - 2012, and occasionally at Oregon College of Art and Craft. In his own work Gunn attends to the relationship between consciousness and the phenomenal world, expressed in simple large forms of nature (human and wild), in text, forms, patterns and signs.