Painter Marcel Bunea was one of the people who actively participated in the December ’98 revolution. He lived a few very tensed moments with his friends and he experienced first-hand the fall of a seemingly indestructible system.
The artist spent his childhood in the city of Cisnadie near Sibiu, a settlement typical for Transylvania, where minorities (Hungarians, Germans) lived in peace with Romanians. He even went to a German school for four years and some of his friends from back then still take him out for a beer. Every holiday he went in the Apuseni Mountains to visit his grandparents. The village they lived in had only four houses, had no electricity and the water was brought in from a fountain in the forest. The things he saw there helped him become an artist. His mother was a teacher and his father was a notary until 1947 when the political regime banned this trade. His father escaped the communists’ persecution due to a striking physical resemblance to Stalin.
Marcel Bunea started painting when he was 10 and was encouraged by his drawing teacher. He convinced his parents to take him to the art high school. The life of art student was not bad, he got to meet people who thought just like him – there were some who liked literature and others who liked painting more. They organised displays and wrote in the high school’s newspaper. Misfortunately, when he was 17, his father died and the shock made him neglect school. After a transfer from Sibiu to Cluj, he got expelled.
Desperate, his family “exiled” him in the Apuseni Mountains at his grandparents’. They took away his shoes and clothes and he could not leave. The only things he could do were reading and painting. He finally “escaped’ when he found a pair of old shoes that his grandfather had abandoned. When he finally got home after many adventures he managed to enter a high school where the principal was painter Chisu, who taught him many things about painting. That’s when he met his mentor, Walter Andreas Kirchner, a drawing teacher from Cisnadie who now lives in Germany.
He taught him that art is not just an imitation of nature. That was also the time when he started getting in trouble with the Securitate because of a friend who painted the British flag as homage to Led Zeppelin. Marcel Bunea never thought about the advantages of a “revolutionary certificate,” he just thanked heaven he survived to enjoy his little girl Alexandra who will be 17 on December 22, 2000.