On 2nd April 2015 my dear old dad sadly passed away. His vegetable patch was behind The Shed (my studio). There were not many days that I wouldn’t hear a knock on the window and a “Morning, son” as he made his way to his parade ground with its regimented beds. The day after he went to meet his maker, I sat in the shed looking through that window at a garden that no longer had a gardener. I sat and drew a staircase ascending to Heaven with Dad climbing the stairs, watched by his old friend.

The drawing was put aside knowing one day it would become a painting. Here we are in the present day. I felt the time was right and from that sketch this book has evolved.

Within these pages there are some light-hearted moments but my faith, following Christ, is a serious part of my life. If I am not painting, I am praying. As my dad the gardener once did, I can only sow the seeds.

My hope is that you, if you don’t already, will pick up the Bible and read the Gospels. Everything you need to know for your own salvation is there, waiting. Although we are saved by grace and faith in Christ, we do need to repent, turn away from sin and be born again in the Spirit.

“Narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

I pray that I make it through that narrow gate, and I wonder if one day when I am walking in God’s Garden, I shall hear that familiar “Morning, son” once again. 

Gary Bunt

As one of the most beloved painters working in Britain today, Gary Bunt has become celebrated for his unique pictorial style. At once familiar and instantly recognisable, he looks back not just to the modern masters that have inspired him, but beyond to the great canons of Western art, bringing a depth of knowledge to his paintings that has captivated audiences for more than two decades now. Those familiar with Bunt’s work will recognise the prevailing trends that dominate much of his output – his deep-rooted fascination (and knowledge surrounding) twentieth century British painting, the playfulness and sense of nostalgia that sing forth from everything that he turns his paintbrush to, and of course the artist’s personal and deep-rooted faith that is never far from the canvas. It is the artist’s faith that is celebrated in this glorious body of new work – his faith in Christ, in art and ultimately in humanity – a message of hope needed now more than ever.

In these eighteen paintings and accompanying poems Bunt looks at the story of the Creation – taken from Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. It is the gateway for many of us in our first interactions with the Christian faith, taught in homes, primary schools and churches throughout the world, charting the story of God creating darkness and light; the sky, sea and earth; the animals and ultimately man and womankind. Here Bunt reimagines the narrative, bringing together Christ and Bert – the artist’s ‘everyman’ – alongside his ever-faithful dog. In choosing this subject, he is continuing a tradition set forth by a long line of painters – from Renaissance masters such as Tintoretto and Michelangelo through to the Pre-Raphaelites and on to Bunt’s favourite twentieth century painter, the great Stanley Spencer. And just as Spencer reimagined stories from the bible in his home village of Cookham – resurrections in the village churchyard or Christ preaching at the village regatta – 7 so too does Bunt bring a familiarity of setting to these stories, with Christ sowing seeds in the vegetable patch, standing bare foot on the beach, or resting in the rickety wheelbarrow.

Bunt is an artist that has well and truly found his voice – and these paintings showcase his brilliance in and understanding of artistic medium. With rich passages of buttery impasto, and a joyful palette, of greens, blues, yellows, and reds, he tells these stories with a wit and charm that one has come to expect from his paintings. Yet each new work is an excitement of discovery, with details that draw the eye across the canvas – from the riotous pigs tearing up the cauliflower patch, to the Oxo tin full of nails used to attach the sunflower leaves and the paint cans full of the many various Farrow & Ball shades. Alongside his artistic vision there is an indisputable technical brilliance to these works, in contrast to the ‘naive’ label often associated by many with the artist. They showcase Bunt’s understanding of composition, using colour to draw the eye across the canvas. In the introduction to Bunt’s 2021 exhibition, The Man Who Found God, Professor the Rt Rev Lord Harries commented on the ‘wonder and simplicity’ with which the artist sees and understands the world around him. Bunt has made his paintings – and his faith – accessible to one and all, enjoyed by millions (including you, the readers of this new book) through paintings, publications, social media and even animation. Inspired by the way, the truth, the life, he is an artist that refuses to stand still, painting every day with the vigour and enthusiasm that drives and inspires him. Recognised here in this beautiful body of work Bunt’s The Creation is a celebration of faith and a feast for the eyes, the heart, and the soul.

Robin Cawdron-Stewart

Gary Bunt paints, without irony, in a deliberately naïve vein. This sets him apart from mainstream contemporary art. He is an outsider artist, yet highly sought-after. One reason for his popularity is his knowing handling of paint, which owes much to his cultivated interest in modern British art. In his newest series, Rooms with a View, paintings by other artists sneak in, onto the walls around the window framing a landscape view, and some of which are partially hidden by a curtain lifting in the breeze. All are recognisable and much-loved pictures, such as Eric Ravilious’s watercolour of the garden at Brick House, the north-west Essex home which he and Edward Bawden, and their wives, shared briefly. (Myths abound as to why this arrangement came to an end, but the most likely is the too regular appearance of a certain pudding. Here, however, Tirzah and Charlotte sit together happily in the garden.) Bunt’s regular nod in this new series to the work of artists he admires adds a note of sly humour to these richly enjoyable works. It also helps bring into focus the part of England that is being explored.

 It is immediately clear that these Rooms with a View owe much to another series which Bunt produced last year. He created twelve large canvases, each one paying tribute to a different artist whose imagery, choice of colours, painterly method, or general mood has inspired his own working practice. The Modern British Tribute Paintings, to give them their generic title, were the first to reveal how well-versed Bunt is in these artists’ lives and work; in each picture, like a brilliant organist, he pulls out the stops needed to recreate their artistic personalities. Two of the most densely allusive are his tributes to L.S. Lowry and to Christopher N.W.Nevinson. Likewise, the tribute to Stanley Spencer was built up by means of small shocks of recognition, such as the view through a window in which the bridge and river scene is lifted straight out of the background to Spencer’s Swan Upping. On the other side of the picture is a shorthand copy of this artist’s The Last Supper, and, on the table immediately below, sit imitation photographs of Spencer’s two wives and a tiny white cross, itself an allusion to the tumbling white crosses that fill the end wall in the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, where the entire decorative scheme concludes with Spencer’s Resurrection of the Soldiers.

Bunt has a habit of building on his recent work, and it is not surprising that Rooms with a View, owe much to his Tribute paintings. What carries over is his ability to make objects speak. In the new series they define a set of interests in Englishness that relate to the view outside.

These rooms do not belong to any specific person, though everything conspires in The Downs, including the view of Mount Caburn, to suggest that this is Peggy Angus’s house ‘Furlongs’, as Robin Cawdron-Stewart suggests.

Among the voluble objects dotted around are three works by Eric Ravilious, who frequently visited Furlongs, while a copy of Noel Carrington’s King Penguin, Life in an English Village, hints at many of the interests that Ravilious, Angus and other of their friends shared.

Elsewhere, in A Rainy Day, a partial view of a brick tower and pebbly beach signals Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, while another view takes us back in time to the relaxed mood of a northern industrial town in the 1960s on a Friday night. Bert and his dog, who for some time have formed part of Bunt’s signature style, were absent in the Tribute series, but in Rooms with a View they return, mostly as distant observers. Although they play a part in every scene, the leading protagonists in the narrative of each painting are now the books, toys, knick-knacks, pottery, or pictures sitting on the windowsill or hanging nearby. In Amongst the Daffodils, they activate memories of the Lake District, through Postman Pat (whose author lived at Kendal), characters out of Beatrix Potter’s books, or the artist Sheila Fell, or the Tate painting in which Dora Carrington’s captured a scene at Watendlath. These objects and images are redolent with memories. Here they are laid out for us like messages from the past.

Cawdron-Stewart reminds us of the strong reflective vein in Bunt’s art. These new paintings encourage us to think about culture and its relation to landscape, and about the communities and friendships that thrived in what today may seem idylls of the past. It is as if Bunt is echoing W. H. Auden’s command, gifted us through his book of poems Look, Stranger! (1936). Its eponymous poem begins:

      ‘Look, stranger, at this island now

      The leaping light for your delight discovers.

      Stand stable here

      And silent be…

The stranger that Auden is addressing is not a foreigner but someone who has allowed him- or herself to become estranged from his or her immediate environment, who has forgotten the beauty of a flint- and-brick wall and the pleasure to be obtained from domestic objects, views through a window, or a coastline town, even on a rainy day. Bunt, likewise, encourages his viewers to pause and reconnect.

Frances Spalding, CBE, FRSL 

Art historian, biographer and critic