Our inaugural exhibition, Three Forms: JB Blunk, showcases his three primary media: painting, wood sculpture and ceramics. Rarely seen paintings on wood and rice paper from the 1970s and 1990s and a selection of stools made between 1962 and 1975 are presented alongside the estate’s new edition of Blunk Cups.
From 1950, Blunk spent several formative years in Japan as apprentice to master potters Rosanjin Kitaoji and Toyo Kaneshige who instructed him in the power of the elemental—earth, water and fire—that would become fundamental to the character of his own practice. While in Japan, he created a unique body of work in clay and also studied calligraphy, producing a series of prints and paintings. He brought these principles back to the US in 1954, settling in Inverness, California, in 1958.
In 1954 Blunk left Japan and by 1958 he had settled in Inverness, California. In 1960 he began working with the abundance of local and salvaged wood, his first pieces being stools and small tables. However, as his reputation spread, commissions for important furniture, private and public sculptures, and environments became a primary part of his practice. The select stools in the exhibition Three Forms, were carved from locally salvaged redwood, cypress, and bay laurel. They reveal varying examples of his furniture while expressing several of Blunk’s favorite motifs: arches, circles, and phalluses. These archetypal forms are present in many of Blunk’s works including his large-scale sculptures, jewelry, ceramics, and paintings.
Throughout his career, Blunk moved seamlessly between diverse disciplines and media, allowing the techniques of one medium to inform another. He often used falloffs (chunks of wood that fell off as he worked on large-scale sculptures), as canvases for his paintings, finding compositions in the textures left by the chainsaw. The abstract paintings on paper from the 1970s relate to his early calligraphy and woodwork. One of the paintings in the exhibit incorporates sawdust from his studio and another has a background made from a rubbing on a redwood slab. The paintings on wood from the 1990s are examples of the last artworks that Blunk created before his passing in 2002.