Art review: Showcasing oft-unseen master Richard Bunkall
Los Angeles Times; Pasadena Sun, March 30, 2012, Kirk Silsbee
“Like few art shows, this one celebrates the joys of expertly handled paint. His canvases have to be studied up close for their thick impastos, dimensional color, deft figurative shorthand and layered brush strokes. Then they beg to be seen from a distance, so the eyes can mix the colors, take in the chiaroscuro and understand the logic of Bunkall’s planes, diffuse shadows and placement of color accents.”
Before steampunk, there was Richard Bunkall’s imagination.
February 24, 2012, Pasadena Star-News, Michelle J. Mills
“A painting on the wall depicts a whale floating in the air through a building’s entryway. Nearby is a highly detailed sculpture that plays with classic architecture. This is Richard Bunkall’s world: a place that is ancient, yet futuristic at the same time. The out of place feels at home.”
Artweek, June, 1999 – Review by Rick Gilbert
“Metapainter Richard Bunkall is a poetic allegorist who evokes a realm of beaux arts edifices of mythologic grandeur and inhuman proportions, suitable for habitation by gods and monsters. Like his American predecessors Abbott Thayer and Elihu Vedder, he is a master of the winged figure and a devotee of symbolic objects and ramatic events. Bunkall’s structural goliaths are so titanic that they can never fit into the canvas in their entirety, but must be viewed fractionally. At the foot of massive porticoes, people scurry about antlike through shadowy, cathedral-vast caverns reminiscent of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons. In works like Daybreak and Reverie, entire buildings or major portions thereof are trussed and tethered like Gulliver netted by the Lilliputians, while cryptic inscriptions chiseled above fleeing caryatids and atlases recall Ozymandias’s pronouncement: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and Despair.”
Painter, Teacher, Father, Friend – Richard Bunkall’s life as a work of art.
Pasadena Weekly Cover Story, May 17, 1999 by Kathleen August
Art of Courage – Star News, March 1, 1998 by Evan Henerson
The Art of Living, Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1998 by Beverly Beyette
“Steadying his right elbow on his left wrist, Richard Bunkall dips a long, thin brush into umber paint and applies it to the big canvas. Then he backs off in his motorized chair – taking care not to run over William, the faithful golden retriever always at his side – and scrutinizes his painting.”
“Richard’s distinctive paintings reflect some of his loves – trains, ships, dirigibles, whales. He may juxtapose any of these where, logically, they don’t belong, then add a classical portico with an inscription from a favorite work, perhaps “Moby Dick” or “Hamlet.” “I like the idea of having a big city block in New York and sticking this big ship on the sidewalk,” he says, “taking the moving object out of its normal setting.””