Nanaimo artist Marg Bonneau’s latest exhibition veers from the representative to the abstract as she tests the limits of the familiar and the strange.
“I don’t want to stay in one place with my painting. I want to go more; see what happens,” Bonneau said.
Her new collection of oil and acrylic paintings, charcoal and collage pieces is called Pushing Boundaries and is being displayed at Art 10 Gallery until the end of the month. An opening reception takes place on Saturday, Aug. 4.
Bonneau said she typically paints portraits of women, but like many area painters she was drawn to the natural beauty of Vancouver Island. Painting empty seaside landscapes led Bonneau to find expression through colour and texture instead of facial features, a technique she then applied to her portraits. By exhibiting those works side-by-side, Bonneau said Pushing Boundaries demonstrates that progression.
“Quite often a show is maybe all landscapes of a particular area, or all people, or all street scenes,” she said.
“This is hard to explain because it’s more about the experimentation. Where I started from and how I kind of migrated through.”
She said in some cases she experimented with applying water and alcohol to her work to create new visual effects. In one piece she used a pallet knife to create texture and in another she started with a searing splash of colour, painted a background on top and turned it into a beach scene.
“You just do it and you can’t tell ahead of time what’s going to happen. In a way it’s kind of controlled and kind of not,” Bonneau explained.
Sometimes her attempts don’t pan out and her work is destroyed, but even in those moments Bonneau, like an art scientist, learns from her mistakes and heads back to the lab.
“To go beyond what you know is more of an adventure because you don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen and that’s more exciting, right? And you come up with things that you could never positively think of in your head.”
Bonneau said she still wants to paint in “both directions” – the conventional and the experimental – but she intends to try new things and go beyond her boundaries.
“I think I’d like to just kind of let it unfold,” she said of her practice. “I’d like to keep experimenting and I’d like to see where that goes.”
WHAT’S ON … Opening reception for Pushing Boundaries at Art 10 Gallery on Saturday, Aug. 4 from 2 to 4 p.m. Show runs until Aug. 31.
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