art interiors - a critical look at a painting by geoff bunn

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With his 2009 work "Morgan's shop", Geoff Bunn extends his series of "Interior Landscapes" into the increasingly familiar milieu of the abandoned local shop.

Bunn employs his typically contrasting palette of warm and cold tones to hint at more than what is simply visible.  Here, the interior of the shop, while empty and bare of all fittings, exposed in its shabby reality, possesses a warmth and a welcoming quality lacking in the exterior, its threat sketchily evoked with hazy blue shadows.

The modern world, it is clear, is alien; hostile to the shop.  The shop is barren, unwanted in this tree-lined suburb – and what could be more pathetic than an empty, old-fashioned shop front?  Yet Bunn reminds us that, not content with having denied the shop any useful purpose, the outside world still attacks; the livid crimson splash of its hatred is visible immediately beyond the shabby old door.  Commercialism will not permit this little shop to be used again.