For this week's paper, I talked to Buddy Bunting about three of his new breakthrough paintings on display at Prole Drift. There's a gleaming prison basketball court abandoned in the sun, a motel room in Flagstaff made on a piece of cardboard using just a handful of brushstrokes and leaving the rest of the brown paper showing through, and a portrait of the rocky area of Grand Ronde as if it were a dessert melting.

We only had space in the print edition for Bunting to talk about three paintings. Below is one more, with his commentary. The painting, oil on paper, is called The AA Meeting, from 2009, and it is just a little, haunting thing, measuring 6 by 7 3/4 inches.

bunting_aa_meeting.jpg
  • Courtesy of the artist

That is in Seattle, it’s—I don’t want to say it’s a secret—but most people see my work and think it’s in a faraway place. That painting is called The AA Meeting. They have these meetings. I don’t actually know what the hell they’re doing, but there’s always a guy standing up talking to these people. I’ll see it when I'm walking around at night.

It was one of the first I did looking into an interior space. It had this Edward Hopper-like quality. Also the abstract arrow thing, and the receding lights.

I look up there and see these people, and they look kind of interested and kind of bored, like they were sent to this meeting. It’s sort of the beginning of an idea that was in one of the drawers of my flat file in my studio.

The whole interview is called "The Crazy Light of Desert Prisons".