Untitled c. 1969

Curator: Here we have a pen and ink drawing simply titled "Untitled," created around 1969 by George Bunker. Editor: My first impression? It's restless, like a thought caught halfway through taking shape. A tangle of lines on the edge of becoming something. Curator: Absolutely. We can certainly place this work within the abstract expressionist movement, a movement born, in part, from the societal upheaval after the Second World War. It is no surprise that we see artists, like Bunker, trying to find ways to visualize interior states of emotion, chaos, and being. We also need to account for what that abstraction can signal when looking at identities marginalized by class. How can a lack of representational elements be interpreted as resistance to societal forces? Editor: Yes! Like an unspoken truth scrawled on a napkin in a smoky cafe, right? I see this frantic energy in so many creative gestures, these scribbles holding so much more than legible clarity. It makes me think of a jazz solo—you don't have to name every note, sometimes it’s about the raw feeling. I wonder, did Bunker begin with a concrete idea that deconstructed over time? Or was the whole process a completely uninhibited flow? Curator: Well, it's interesting that you mention music because the idea of automatism certainly impacted that time. The influence of Surrealism is undeniable, and their employment of spontaneous artistic methods allowed the unconscious to shape their works, thus giving us access to different means of interpretation. But I always question what appears to be accidental. Can such a thing really exist when artistic intention, however hidden, is the impetus of every single act? Editor: Maybe accident is just the muse in disguise? You can approach that through so many directions—thinking, say, about how the tools inform expression... a pen on paper feels a lot more immediate than, I don’t know, carving marble. What limitations give way to when embraced as part of a project’s possibilities? Curator: And yet the choice of ink implies permanence, a committal to the mark. It speaks volumes. This artwork functions on a deeply symbolic register. It captures the feeling of an era, I think, in the immediacy of its execution. Editor: A mood captured, absolutely. All of those ideas crammed into what looks like a first draft… There’s something so honest about that. I look at it and think "begin anywhere".