August 2022 – Bonnie Carlson

Painting the Sides

There is something like frosting a cake in painting the sides of stretched canvases.

Some days you struggle to draw your coffee cup, while other days you paint four paintings while also working a 9 hour day, warming up a lasagna for your kid, prepping breakfast for three, and taking care of your post-surgical dog and her rambunctious roommate. I don’t know why that is. But it is.

I started here:

And then I dialed back the color and went here:

And that’s what came out of today.

Bonnie Carlson was born in New York City in 1963. She has lived, worked and traveled throughout America and around the world, especially in Western and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and South Asia. Her subjects are often drawn from iconic scenes from her travels, filtered through early visual memories of the posters, signs, ads, comics, album covers, and graffiti of 60s and 70s urban America. She paints abstracts, cityscapes, landscapes, and portraits in acrylic on paper and canvas. Bonnie takes the complex and renders it in a spare, graphic style with dark, inked outlines and bold colors drawn from the brightest pallets of her travels. Her work is inspired by Fauvism, Pop Art, Street Art and Art Brut.

Bonnie now calls Washington, D.C. and Damariscotta, Maine home.