Bonnie Brown’s paintings are lyrical, delightful, gentle, soft and charming. Bonnie’s paintings are also precise, rigorous, dynamic, concentrated and exacting. Her paintings are lyrical evocations of time and place, gently combining inner and outer worlds in a rich fabric of texture, pattern and colour. She perceives the immediate world around her, measures it against herself and creates a visual synthesis which becomes the painting. The paintings are non-figurative and abstract in the sense that formal visual elements are placed in a medium of marks and surfaces to combine into rhythms and balances. They are, however, also figurative in that her awareness of places and objects leads to a distillation of these observations into an emblematic imagery. 

As with all good paintings Bonnie’s are much easier to understand by contemplating them and allowing the visual imagery to speak to you than by trying to verbalize the responses they evoke. Their qualities rest in the exquisite balance between the formal organization of shapes and fragments and the freedom of gesture she uses to create the textures within the shapes. The pictorial Ideas that come from observations of the walls and surfaces in French villages, for instance, where the artist is often found remind us that all walls tell stories. As they age walls are witnesses to the events around them and to the passage of time. They display the history of a place. Responding to and understanding this interplay between nature and humanity provides wonderful opportunities for an artist such as Bonnie. She does not attempt to recreate these surfaces but uses textures, marks, and scratches to make pictorial equivalents. The marks come from a vocabulary that is specific to her and yet have archetypal resonances. There is further excitement in the way the fragments appear and – painted on, obliterated, rediscovered by delicate scratchings and incised lines or emphasized by painted marks.  

The paintings are immensely satisfying to the eye because of the way that apparently random fragments, visually delightful and mysterious in their own way, are collected and presented in an orderly and balanced way, almost like precious archaeological finds being collated and presented for documentation. The imposed marks and incisions make links that draw the compositions together. The tactile quality of the surfaces has a universally powerful appeal to the senses.  The result of these processes is that the viewer is able to relate to Bonnie’s paintings in ways that mark them out as being of a truly special quality.