Artist on the Rise: Painter Michael Gunn - Inside Art with Michael Rose

Artist on the Rise: Painter Michael Gunn - Inside Art with Michael Rose

 

With so many talented emerging artists studying at local colleges, it is easy to find young makers who possess admirable skills. Rhode Island School of Design senior Michael Gunn is one early-career artist to watch. Remarkably multi-talented, Gunn is a gifted painter and pairs his studio-based labors with passions for art history, writing, and curation.

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Raised in rural Pennsylvania, Gunn comes from a large family. His parents and a number of his siblings have served in the military and Gunn says he has enjoyed plenty of familial support and encouragement of his artistic pursuits. At RISD, Gunn has been highly involved. He has worked for RISD as a residential advisor, teaching assistant, and curatorial assistant in the Nature Lab. He is also an editor for the campus publication Volume.1 and is currently a fellow in the Contemporary Art Department of the RISD Museum. All of this is balanced alongside his art-making.

 

 

Painting in a studio on Benefit Street, Gunn creates at a brisk pace. Encouraged by the necessity of making work for his senior thesis, Gunn has a space arrayed with paintings, drawings, metalwork, and experimental pieces that show off his assorted interests. Gunn’s paintings are fascinating, blurring figuration and narrative with a keen sense for illumination. Bodies, flowers, and transparencies are also recurring motifs. Finding inspiration from a variety of venues, he has art monographs scattered across the floor.

 

Gunn is in some ways a hands-off artist, and does not seek to micromanage how viewers experience his work. Asked about how he hopes people interact with his paintings, he responds, “I suppose that is a process I’m reluctant to guide. Painting has been a place I always go to experience deep sensitivity and care, at moments an intense amount of patience, and sometimes humor. Our experiences are so vastly different from one another that I never expect someone to feel the same way about my work as I do, but I enjoy how the work can potentially prompt slowing down and being connected to the world I’m beginning to build or witness in reflection of my day to day. The farthest I’d go is saying that the images make obvious things I’m really committed to seeking out or reflecting on emotionally.”

 

 

In addition to his impressive work as a studio artist, Gunn is also an emerging curator with an eye for connections. Along with his fellow RISD students Madeline Menkes and Marshall Baker, Gunn co-curated Living Urn, an exhibition on view in the Gelman Gallery through April 7. The strong show includes work by Gunn and his fellow curators, as well as dozens of their RISD peers.

 

Asked about his varied interests, Gunn replies that his forays into curatorial work and art history have improved his art, saying in part, “My opportunities to engage with assembling collections of work and seeing large swaths of objects from many time periods up close and intimate within the classroom has altered how isolated I once felt in the studio. I came to terms with the fact that my work never exists independently in some vacuum or in my mind, and this conversational aspect of painting specifically—how it engages with itself as a medium that experiences time as less linear than we often think, entangled and constantly appropriating itself—has been what deepens and complicates my practice.”

 

 

Gunn has much to be excited about as he anticipates the successful close of his time at RISD. Looking forward, he plans to decompress after graduation. Describing what is next for him, Gunn states, “In the coming months I’ll be showing with my cohort across campus, and am looking forward to receptions and hopefully engagement from anyone who wants to come. My plans are to stay in Providence for a year or so to slow down post-grad, keep painting, read all the books I’ve been recommended, and engage with the art communities here. Providence has a lot to offer, and I don’t want to miss that experience by leaving too quickly. I’d like to keep teaching, curating, and exhibiting, and I’ve been beginning the process of connecting myself to spaces to do that, so for now a lot feels possible yet undefined. I’ll be making art and having good conversations with old and new friends is the big thing.”

 

 

Gunn’s paintings are beautifully produced and deeply imbued with sensitivity and personality. Though still in college, he has already developed a complex and distinguishable aesthetic sensibility that sets him apart from his contemporaries. It will be exciting to see what comes next for this remarkable young painter and where his career path will take him.

 

 

Learn more about Michael Gunn at www.michaelfgunn.com and follow his studio practice on Instagram at @michaelgunnart.