Untitled c. 1963

George Bunker made this untitled pastel drawing on paper at an unknown date. I love the scrawly, immediate quality of this drawing. Look at the layers of green, blue, and brown, hatching and scribbling, feeling their way across the page. I can imagine Bunker hunched over this pad, wrestling with shapes and colours, trying to get something down, something he can almost see but not quite. It makes me think of Guston's late work, but softer, more tentative. The pink and purple blocks feel like they are about to topple over but are held in place by the green and blue. There’s a real push and pull here. I wonder what Bunker was looking at, what he was thinking. Maybe it was a landscape, maybe an interior, or maybe it was just a feeling, an idea, that he was trying to capture with these strokes of colour. It's as if he’s in conversation with all the other artists who have tried to put something down, to make something out of nothing.