THE QUIET POWER OF A CURATED PALETTE

Nature has many nuances, endless entry points in which it reveals itself to the viewer. But at its core, nature is simple. It wants you to understand. And its language is tone, atmosphere—how it makes you feel when you are immersed in it.

In her Red Stone Farm Studio in Doylestown, Dot Bunn speaks that language, chronicling the natural splendor of Bucks County in representational oil paintings and teaching students her specialized color method that renders rich, deeply nuanced works of art. Bunn, who turns 80 in September, employs the Fletcher Color System, a method of organizing colors into a selected color key to achieve harmony and consistency. This system helps artists mix colors systematically and avoid dull or mismatched combinations. “My color theory is based on a circular palette using the twelve colors that I believe are the full spectrum of what we can see,” Bunn says. “How you cross-mix these twelve colors determines if you have good harmony in your painting. I’m a realistic painter. It’s important for me to capture atmosphere in a painting. And to do that, you really have to control your color choices.”

In her group classes, taught three times a week and one Saturday a month, she instructs students to start with a triad of colors, which will form the core colors of the painting. Two colors, chosen within three steps of each other on the color wheel, control most of the composition. A third color from the opposite side of the color wheel creates contrast and brings the painting to life. “By not throwing in every color in the palette, they are controlling their harmony,” she explains.

Bunn was raised in Warminster and began her formal art studies at the Hicks Art Center at Bucks County Community College, but she received most of her critical instruction and inspiration from Myron Barnstone, of Barnstone Studios in Coplay, Pennsylvania, who introduced her to the Fletcher system. Barnstone’s instruction became the basis for her method in which three main colors control the work’s overall mood.

“I start out with monochrome, maybe just a Raw Umber,” she says. “That is value—basically light passing over form—and that’s where you reveal form in an object. I teach that value is more important than color. Color is the decorative end. It’s not where a great painting starts.”

Bunn’s subject matter consists of landscape, still life, and figurative painting.

“I strongly believe an artist needs to be interpreting what they know, not just painting whatever looks pretty to them,” she says. “I’ve always been a Bucks County painter. I used to paint a lot more Bucks County scenes, but we have lost so much in the way of barns and the open fields. The rural aspect of Bucks County is slipping away.”

She paints and teaches classes, which she caps at eight students per class, in traditional oil painting in her studio, which is attached to her old stone farmhouse. She started teaching about fifteen years ago, and some of her students have been with her from the beginning. “It’s kind of crazy. I tell them, ‘I’ve given you everything I’ve got,’” she says with a laugh. “They don’t want to leave.”

Bunn also opens her studio to painting demonstrations by other artists as well as herself. Over three weeks last fall, she completed Autumn Hues—based on a scene near the Artists of Yardley Art Center in Lower Makefield—as visitors came in daily to witness the painting reveal itself under her brush. “There’s a property that has a beautiful little watering feature, and that’s what that piece is from,” Bunn says. “To me, it’s typical Bucks County, but of course it doesn’t have any structure.”

For her landscapes, she references digital photos she has taken and altered with Photoshop Elements. “I may take things out, put things in, or change the light,” she says. “I look at the image on my iMac, which is set up next to my easel as though I’m looking out a window, and paint directly onto the canvas.”

She composes and photographs still life vignettes in her studio. Most elements are personal items that have emotional resonance, like flowers she’s plucked from her garden or received as a gift. “I do a lot of glazing to get depth of color and vibration in the piece,” she says. “Glazing requires the painting to be dry, so I let it dry, then I go to the next level and let that dry. After four days, I’m pretty close to where I want to be.”

The most popular size she works with is 18-by-24 inches, though the size of a work is generally dictated by the composition. She prefers painting on linen, though she’ll use stretched canvas for especially large paintings. Sometimes she’ll mount Arches oil paper, designed for oil painting, to a board. “I like the hard surface,” she says.

Bunn has participated in numerous solo and group shows regionally and has exhibited nationally with Oil Painters of America, Allied Artists of America, the American Artists Professional League, and the Hudson Valley Art Association. She has been awarded the Alden Bryan Memorial Medal for Traditional Landscape (for an autumnal landscape titled On the Edge), two Patrons’ Awards for Painting from the Juried Art Show at Phillips’ Mill, and the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Arts by the Central Bucks Chamber of Commerce. She’s also donated paintings to benefit community organizations, among them Bucks Beautiful.

Her paintings are on view at Kolbe Antiques & Art on River Road in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania, at Poppa Frank’s American Kitchen in New Hope, and in several corporate collections. Inside the Banquet Room of the Historic Strawberry Mansion in Philadelphia, Bunn’s 500-square-foot panoramic full-room wall mural depicts nearby mansions as they might have looked in the early part of the nineteenth century.

“Art is wonderful because it takes you out of your daily problems,” Bunn says. “If you focus on something, you can spend two-and-a-half hours just really enjoying that creative moment.”

Patti Zielinski, the chief arts writer for River Towns, profiled Alexandria sculptor Shawn Campbell in the Summer issue.