Thus Gunderson’s blackness is no longer the pause in the music of the picture, as Kandinsky called it, that hovered profound remains a desert, but a richly textured surface emanating its own subtle, ever-changing light.  It has become atmosphere, and sings with light, making it less oppressive if still omnipresent.  Gunderson, then, uses blackness in an original, organic way, renewing its power and enigma.  It is both abysmal an d detached—signals the unfathomable depths of feeling that led her royal figures to make the brave decisions they did, as well as the impersonal, epic remoteness of their spiritual victory over physical and social adversity.  Each is a remote, isolated as well as intimate, engaging figure—high on a throne or a horse or in a space of his own, yet at the same time very human, as the changing expressions of his face show. 

Gunderson’s touch is both descriptive detail and pure energy.  That is, it meticulously delineates brick, cloth, wood, skin, metal, but also exists in its own expressive and material right.  Thus, it is both subjective signature and objectifying sign.  Gunderson’s painterly ingenuity serves her larger point well: her pictures convey the special unity of worldly action and emotional conviction that was the daring life of her kings.  Their authority and grandeur is moral, not just the result of their position.  Each was, in his own way, an authentically courageous hero—a true role model in bleak times.  However much each is a black ghost, the subliminal light that informs their blackness bespeaks their practical idealism.  Each was a bright beacon in dark times, outwardly as dark as the times but inwardly luminous, their dark light radiating into the darkness beyond themselves.