For Immediate Release:

BONNEY GOLDSTEIN

Painter

June 18 thru July 1

Opening Reception Friday, June 18, 7-9PM

Bonney Goldstein’s new mixed media paintings are meditations on time, place, weather, memory, experience and perception. The work calls the viewer to a heightened awareness of the effects of the accumulation of small acts and accidents over time, the twists and turns that lead to this one present moment; the way life evolves -- intimacy, relationship, understanding -- moment to moment. 

Goldstein’s study of art history and her obsession to know how artists achieve particular effects led her to begin to pay attention to what was underneath the surface of her own work. The simplicity of the image belies the complexity of the making.

I began to work in layers of color, building up textures and cavities,

creating scarred surfaces and playing colors against each other.

With their build-up of paint, wax, sand, incorporated found or discarded objects, incised markings resembling ancient hieroglyph or futuristic scientific notation, scratched-in drawings like cave paintings, these mixed media neoexpressionist paintings depart from the expected to create a language of process and a record of personal evolution.  

In this recent work, Goldstein continues to explore the nature of that evolution in terms of relationships -- the external as it touches the internal.  Goldstein is concerned with point of view.  She considers the nature of boundaries, both personal and real. Where does one’s being meet the world?  How does one learn to recognize individual space and safeguard one’s own? When everything is changing, where does one stand?

The expressive power of her rich and subtle colors conveys the tremor of emotion embedded in the layers.  New paintings worked in a more tonal harmony and limited range of hues suggest a deeper, more inward and fluid energy, like waves beginning on a far shore.  The viewer senses the painter’s increasing deftness and range. The work records a personal, intimate connection between what is out there and what is in the painter.  It records that moment of personal meeting, yet evokes a sense of the universal, the mystery of all life. 

Goldstein received a BS from Mills College in California, and a MFA from Goddard College in Vermont.  She has studied at The Art Students League in New York, and the Denver Art Students League.  She has exhibited her work throughout New England, in Colorado, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, and is in numerous private collections across the country.  She has received many awards for her work, among them the Irene Gallen Memorial Award, New Hampshire Art Association, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, the Mill Pond Center for The Arts “Best Works on Paper” award.  In 2002, her work was selected for “The American River” traveling exhibition organized by the Great River Arts Institute in Walpole, NH, and she was featured in a one-person invitational exhibition at University of Massachusetts.