Bonny Hill

re:Surfacing

Bonny Hill is both an artist and an art educator. She completed a Bachelor of Art in Art Education at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984 and has been teaching art in public schools for 25 years. She is currently working toward a Masters of Education through courses from a number of universities including the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design.

She is thrilled to ‘re-surface’ in the Frazee Gallery where she had her first solo show, Surfaces, in 2006. “I’ll always think of the Saint John Arts Centre as my home gallery,” Bonny explains. “The staff and volunteers here are so wonderful and encouraging and the building is really beautiful.”

Bonny resides in Sussex with her husband and two daughters and is excited about a new installation series she is beginning work on this summer through an Artsnb creation grant.

Artist Statement

“The formal and conceptual concerns that have driven my recent work are quite straight-forward.

My interest is in the connection between painting and photography, and how changes in technology alter and, in turn, shape our understanding of the world and the way in which we make images in general and paintings in particular. I am interested in using the camera as a tool in making a painting where the photograph – rather than the thing depicted – becomes the subject.

Why make paintings if my interest is in photographic images? The paintings are dependant on photography for their existence but would be very different as photographs. Photography, as a medium, would not allow me to make the images as large as I felt they needed to be to have real impact and would limit greatly the surface interest that I enjoy exploring through my work. The title of this work, re:Surfaces, is to draw attention to the surface of the canvas; to stress the importance of painting being about applying pigment to a flat surface in interesting ways. I enjoy a painting that the viewer both looks through, in a photo-realistic sense, and looks at, in terms on examining the formal qualities of the actual paint and how it is applied.

The Surface/Image series was begun in 2006 through an Artsnb creation grant. My interest in this series is in how changes in technology are dramatically changing the way that people are taking photographs and in the impact of this revolution in photography on portrait painting. Young people, in particular, are snapping hundreds of shots very quickly, at unusual angles, and in different lighting situations, without planning, wherever they happen to be. There is a huge amount of editing; only the most interesting or most expressive of their desired image are saved and posted on self-publishing sites such as Facebook.

The resulting photographs are becoming a very important vehicle for self-expression: a modern sort of diary, documenting the growth and development of these young people. The photographic references are from pictures that my high school students have taken of themselves using simple, hand-held digital cameras and the paintings are clearly referenced from photographs, rather than from direct observation. Some are from black and white or colour-enhanced images and may include reflections or shadows of the photographer, out of focus areas or motion blur, clearly defining them as photographic.

As with my earlier Water Series, I wanted the paintings to look like studies of the two-dimensional references they were
made from rather than depictions of ‘the real thing’. The portrait paintings are entitled Surface/Image, referring both to my formal concern of creating a lively paint surface of the canvas and, on a conceptual level, to my interest in the social phenomena of self-publishing using digital images.

I hope my viewers will begin to think about how we create an ‘image’ for ourselves and use it for communication, and for socialization, and how much information a visual image of our ‘surface’ appearance can convey. My interest in questioning what is ‘real’, begun in the Water Series, continues with the Surface/Image portraits. In thinking about the notion of reality versus perception, I’m reminded of hearing of a parent who, upon being told she had a beautiful child said, “You think he is beautiful – you should see his photograph!”

The exploration and, perhaps, celebration of these new images from popular culture is my main focus. My influences range from Chuck Close and Andy Warhol to Jackson Pollock and Marshall McLuhan.”