Jerry Kunkel’s paintings speak to our individual appetite for self-reflection, born of a collective and universal desire to comprehend, both physically and emotionally, the world around us. He often weaved narratives in a poetic or humorous fashion, sometimes constructing the work with no apparent end in sight, allowing the consequent juxtapositions of images to create a story. His work superimposes original and found imagery with the addition of text as an attitudinal descriptor, or an extra, content-specific image. In addition, the frequent incorporation of the illusion of plywood or other non-precious surfaces adds the element of the everyday and has pervaded his work for years.

Jerry was interested in our momentary reaction to everyday stimuli, that moment that summons a private response – a response that we may not feel compelled to share for a variety of reasons; perhaps because it doesn’t seem important, that our response is not fully formed, or we simply don’t care to think about why we really don’t care. In the end, whatever it is, he would say “trust what emerges and embrace uncertainty.”