Bonita’s early influences include her time studying dance, which she says still animates her paintings through the sense of musicality and movement within her compositions. Later, as a young woman she took a workshop with Francoise Gilot with whom she became close friends. It was Gilot who introduced her to Carl Jung’s idea of the archetype and influenced her interest in the study of a symbolic language of form. She also had an opportunity to study with D.T. Suzuki, the first Japanese scholar to bring direct knowledge and teaching of Buddhism to the West. All of these early experiences have helped to shape her interests and the themes that guide her work.

She spoke about her process: “At first I establish my ground putting on four or five layers of paint – from full brushstrokes to thin washes and drips and splashes – striving to capture a shimmering luminous field. Sometimes I use nacreous-metallic pigments as undercoats and in thin washes of color to create a light sensitive, reflective surface that subtly glows and animates the space. Then I place the canvases on the floor and pour paint from varying heights with a deep understanding of how much it will spread out when it hits the canvas. I have a great deal of control of my materials and how they will behave. Unexpected happy accidents occur along the way, but there are no mistakes. I use various mixes to achieve different effects that allow the paint to reflect spontaneous organic processes. I then develop the delicate spatial qualities, rubbing areas out, adding washes of color, mists of spray paint etc. to subtly enhance and subdue various areas, until there is a unity and the presence of mystery.”

Painting has a protean capacity at verisimilitude; from rendering things in a realistic approach, to innovating techniques where the process emulates organic phenomena – creating imagery whose appearance conveys microscopic or galactic visions. It is a capacity that gives painting an alchemical quality. For centuries the medium’s plasticity has allowed artists to continue to develop languages that reflect the current philosophical and intellectual pursuits of their times. In Bonita’s hands, this dexterity is expressed through an emotive poetry of form and feeling that explores the far edges of knowledge about our place in the universe, the nature of reality, and the unknown invisible forces that shape existence.

It is in her deep sensitivity to spatial considerations that the seemingly haphazard processes are in essence masterful, delicate coordinates of color-surface- gradients – all rendered in a subtle yet delicately physical approach. They have a surface quality that simultaneously reads (varying from piece to piece) as a silver-leafed field from a 19th century Asian painting, the sun bleached, weathered and distressed surface of a wall from DTLA, or a galactic field captured in a Hubble deep space photograph. There is something touching upon Rothko’s subtly worked surfaces where myriad veils of color – anchored in a delicate physicality – exist as both light and surface, spirit and matter. It is the unification of opposites, the reconciliation of being and nothingness that Bonita seeks to express; the wonder of existence and its impermanence. It is the immanence of spirit creating worlds from the void upon which they return in an eternal cycle of “becoming and passing”.