Alf Gundersen

an extract from Alf's daughter Sam's eulogy at his memorial service:

Alf was a prolific artist who had no understanding for artists who sat waiting for inspiration.Work, for him, realised inspiration. As for the indulgence of meaning in art he had no such vanity.  He was an art for art’s sake adherent. It was rather for the purity of a seamless technique and a threadbare delicacy that he strove; where the subject and the choice of it, are the chief protagonists. His bent was to paint the unworded frailty of both the object and its surroundings, beautifully.

On one of my infrequent visits, after he and my mother moved to Prince Albert , I accompanied him on a morning walk.He pointed out the hard edge of theKaroo horizon against the pale sky.“Ah,” he said in his wistful way of speaking, “if I could only paint that.” “But you do Dad,” I said. And of course he did.There was nothing in Alf’s work that was fudged or ill-defined. Nothing that was unresolved or overworked; nothing overblown or distasteful. His paintings of theKaroo transcend the sameness, to an exalted locus where bleakness and the feeling that it imparts, becomes transport.

It is sad that a rare man of rare talent is gone, but his work will most assuredly live on. Apart from the feeling of separateness that his paintings convey, which is for some unsettling, Alf’s style appeals to most of us. His paintings will always give to the viewer as much a sense of place, as of their own selves.  And if they look long enough they will perhaps intercept the bitter-sweet irony of the man who painted them.