Dennis Miller Bunker: Teacher

"Meadow Lands" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis Miller Bunker was certainly a fine teacher of his art and, had he lived longer, he might well have become a great teacher. He had a rare gift for putting into clear and unforgettable phrases the fundamental principles on which the art of paint is based. To make these simple truths cogent realities to the student is perhaps the most important part of teaching. It is certainly the most difficult part, because their essential meaning can only be grasped by a person whose aesthetic perceptions have been developed to the degree necessary for the understanding of their application to the concrete problems of painting pictures. The validity of certain axioms becomes apparent to the art student only as his eye becomes trained to perceive visual facts which are imperceptible to the layman. His awareness of these facts is developed by two things: by the actual practice of drawing and painting from nature and by hearing from his teacher restatements, in diverse applications, of the general principles underlying visual phenomena. Perception and understanding develop together. A good teacher of painting never loses sight of this fact and has the ability to adjust his generalizations to the growing understanding of each student. This is just what Bunker did.

• A few examples may served to give an idea of his ability to go to the heart of a matter in a simple and direct statement. 'Why don't you paint what you see? It's just as easy and twice as interesting,' Bunker would say to bring home to his pupils the aesthetic justification of truthful representation.
  
  
• 'Keep on preparing your picture, and some morning you'll come in and find it finished,' was an axiom of his, a rather dark saying the profundity of which is increasingly apparent to the mature artist the longer he paints.

Former students at Cowles remembered two charcoal drawings hanging in one of the halls. These drawings, which Dennis Bunker had made in Paris, were studies of casts in the gallery of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, one of the them representing the figure of Day from the Medici tombs, the other the torso of Ilissus. On the latter drawing Gerome had written: 'Ces torses sont la base de l'education. It faut etre nourri sur ces choses-la dans la jeunesse ['These torsos are the basis of education. You have to be fed on these things in youth.'] J.L Gerome.' This is of considerable interest, bearing, as it does, a message embodying one of the fundamental principles of nineteenth century academic art teaching."

  To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)