Winter as a spiritual practice
Studio B: The work of Gary Bunt and the dailiness of contentment
Studio B is an archive of paintings I can’t stop looking at, and artists I wish I could talk to. Short(ish) visual essays on art history, beauty, influence, and whatever else comes through the frame, typically focused on a single artist at a time. My hope is that it feels as if we’re wandering through a gallery of the artist’s life together.
More from Studio B:
Edward Hopper, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Rousseau, Paul Gauguin, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Odilon Redon, Henri Matisse
I wasn’t sure I should send anything out on Christmas morning. It felt a bit presumptuous, maybe, to interrupt the day with an email when people are with their families or sleeping in or dealing with the complicated emotional weather that holidays bring. But if there was ever a Studio B artist whose work belonged to this day, it’s Gary Bunt. His winter scenes have this quality of stillness and contentment that Christmas morning used to have before we turned it into something frantic and obligatory. Back when it was just about being warm inside while the world outside was cold, about simple pleasures and the people (and dogs) you loved being nearby.
Gary Bunt painted winter the way most people paint spring, as a season not to be endured but inhabited. His winter scenes don’t promise you’ll make it through to warmth and flowers, they suggest that the walking itself, the being cold together, the coming home to a fire afterward, might be what we’re actually here for. What I didn’t know when I first encountered his work was that many of these scenes were painted during a period when he didn’t expect to grow old at all. The old man who appears again and again—Bert, named for his father—was not just a memory but an imagined future. A life slowed down, a body still capable of walking, of gardening, of reading quietly by the fire. Each winter walk and quiet evening was painted not from certainty but from hope.
The long way around
Gary Bunt was born in 1957 in East Peckham, a village in Kent surrounded by hop fields and orchards, and he described his childhood as something close to idyllic—bird-watching and long walks, the mile to school on foot, Vimto and crisps at the local pub, the kind of rural English boyhood that feels almost mythical now but was simply how people lived in certain places at certain times. His father Bert had been a foundling, abandoned as a baby, and grew up to become a building contractor, while his mother Ivy worked on farms. They were working people who believed in things you could touch and build and grow, who understood that a good life was made not from grand gestures but from showing up, day after day, to tend what needed tending.