Melissa Bonin (American/Louisiana, b. 1960), "Mirror in the Sky", 2022, oil on gallery-wrapped canvas, signed lower right, signed, dated and inscribed en verso, 30 in. x 40 in., unframed. Note: ?When I go out on the water, something happens to me. I feel an electricity, an energy.? - Melissa BoninNew Iberia native Melissa Bonin started painting at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette at the age of fifteen at the insistence of local artist Elemore Morgan, Jr. who became her mentor and whose expressive landscapes inspired her in her subject matter and approach. At ULL, she also had the opportunity to study under Tom Secrest, Herman Mhire and William Moreland, all of whom she lists as influences for her body of work. After earning her BFA in 1981, she traveled abroad to study art and French in Paris, Angers and the south of France. She furthered her studies upon her return to the United States at Bennington College and the Massachusetts School of Fine Art in Boston. Bonin has achieved much recognition and many accolades for her work, receiving important commissions, such as a forty-eight-foot mural for the city of New Iberia, the Bunk Johnson award for Visual Arts, and an Atchafalaya Basin Foundation Grant. Her works are in many important private and public collections and have graced the walls of institutions such as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Knoxville Museum of Art, and the Bayou Teche Museum, among others.Throughout her celebrated career, she has and continues to experiment with a multitude of media and is even a talented poet. Her paintings have evolved from her earlier abstract canvases featuring an experimental grid-like layout of colorful pastel squares to her more recent moody bayou landscapes. A constant innovator who draws on her Cajun heritage as inspiration, Bonin has become an ambassador for Cajun culture and the state of Louisiana. With her adept brushstrokes, she is able to capture the timeless, luminous spirit of the bayou and its enduring beauty, symbolic of the resilience of the once violently displaced Cajun people. Her approach to creation is meditative, working in solitary silence and applying color to canvas instinctually and subconsciously. ?Landscapes permit me to sit on the edge of abstraction and reality. You can manipulate colors in a way that produces a feeling of the landscape without copying everything realistically.?Ref.: Kemp, John R. Expressions of Place: The Contemporary Louisiana Landscape. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016; Kemp, John R. ?Melissa Bonin.? 64 Parishes. Sept. 12, 2012. www.64parishes.org. Accessed May 2, 2024.

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