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From car enthusiast to artist

CN-IS-gunnell3 Dark Ships-Watercolor Oil painting by John Gunnell
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Dark Ships-Watercolor by John Gunnell

Iola man follows lifelong dream

Gunnell

When John Gunnell was in kindergarten, he drew a picture of a zoo and squeezed a lion into the monkey cage.

His classmates asked why the lion had not eaten the monkey.

“’Cause he’s the Friendly Lion,” Gunnell answered.

Everyone liked that answer and encouraged him to do more artwork.

“I’ve never liked my own stuff,” said Gunnell, an Iola resident who gave up art in 1978 and picked it up last fall after taking Deann De La Ronde’s oil painting class at Fox Valley Technical College’s campus in Waupaca. “But the approval and encouragement of other people gave me dreams of becoming an artist.”

Gunnell – who lived in Staten Island, New York, at the time – went on to study industrial design at Brooklyn Technical High School.
He studied at Staten Island Community College and Richmond College, two branches of the City University of New York that had free tuition at that time.

Richmond College launched an art program, and Gunnell studied with abstract expressionist Pat Passlof and realist Lennart Anderson.
Married with a family, Gunnell worked nights in a supermarket and attended classes by day.

He earned his degree in 1975 and tried to get a commercial art job.

He was offered work, but the pay was $80 per week compared to the $450 he was making in the grocery business.

As an outlet for his creative side, Gunnell started writing stories about collecting old cars, which was a hobby of his.

By 1978, his freelance writing evolved into a career when he was hired as an editor for Old Cars Weekly, a car magazine then located in Iola.

In 1978-80, he took sketch classes at the Whiting Hotel in Stevens Point that were taught by a University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point instructor.

Gunnell worked at Old Cars Weekly until 2008.

During his 30 years there, he became publisher of the magazine and wrote more than 85 books about cars and trucks.

After quitting in 2008, he opened auto restoration shops in Manawa and Waupaca.

“I stopped working on customer cars in 2018 and refocused the business on freelance writing and appraisals,” Gunnell said. “By that time, I was taking Deann De La Ronde’s oil painting class at FVTC, so I decided to turn part of the Manawa shop into an art studio.”

Full-time artist

He has done nearly 100 paintings in the past year.

Many of his artworks are paintings of barns based on his love of the barn paintings done by an abstract expressionist named Wolf Kahn.

“One time when I was studying in New York, Pat Passlof took us to a party that Wolf Kahn was at, but I was too shy then to approach him,” Gunnell recalled. “Later, I fell in love with his paintings – especially his barns – and wished I had talked to him that night.”

Gunnell currently exhibits his paintings at the Union Street Emporium in Waupaca.

He has also participated in two shows at The Riverfront Art Center in Stevens Point and in the Manawa Art Tour.

His dream is to get his works into a New York City gallery.

“I’m not interested in making a ton of money with my art,” he says. “It’s more a case of making my dreams of being an artist come true. A NYC gallery show would do that.”

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