Louis Bunce came to Portland with his parents in 1913. He attended high school and the Museum Art School before leaving for the Art Students League in New York. While attending school in New York he became friends with many promising artists, including Jackson Pollock and David Smith. In 1939 he worked for the WPA Easel Project in New York and by the time he returned to Portland he was an established artist on the East Coast. He worked at the WPA art center in Salem as an Instructor and Assistant Director. His work included murals, two of which are in the Post Offices in Grants Pass and St. Johns. Their subjects, mining and orchard farming, are activities of each region. "I have always been visually drawn to the landscape, at first the desert and mountain regions of Wyoming; then the lush and gentle color of the Pacific Northwest and the urban landscape of New York." From 1942-1945 he worked as an illustrator, a tool designer, and in assembly for the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation.

After WWII, Bunce joined the faculty of the Museum Art School in Portland, where he had been a student in 1925-1926. He taught there until his retirement in 1972. He excelled at producing screenprints and introduced this technique to Oregon. While maintaining a national reputation throughout the 1950s and 1960s, some of New York's most prestigious galleries represented him.

Louis and wife Eda opened a full-time art gallery in Portland in 1949, called the Kharouba.