Bonnie Dolin’s Paintings on Display at Judson Park’s Galleries

The interplay between shifting light and color sets the tone for Bonnie Dolin’s vibrant and often whimsical paintings and mixed-media pieces. Her approach involves “intuitive painting”—no prescribed plan, yet a framework inspired by structures or scenes in the natural world.

“A lot of the forms I use are abstract, but they relate back to flowers or animals or buildings like small houses,” says Dolin, a 1973 graduate of Cleveland Institute of Art whose works have been widely exhibited.

Her show, Paintings, runs through July 18 at Judson Park’s Howson and Dr. George A. Streeter Galleries.

Dolin has shown her works at Judson before—but in a way, this exhibit is a sort of homecoming. A late Judson Park resident purchased one of her paintings for the Park’s vestibule, and it was put in storage during renovations. “They will hang the painting at the entrance of the Howson Gallery, and I’m happy to see it again,” she says.

The Paintings show will include a series of oil and watercolor pieces in a 9 x 12-inch format, which is smaller than Dolin typically works, though all sizes will be on display, she says.

Dolin’s latest pieces reflect a “pandemic painting” shift while working from her home studio in Aurora. She had read a coffee table book about glass artist Dale Chihuly and how he manipulates natural forms in his pieces.

“I was surrounded by natural forms and decided I would create paintings based on water or what I perceived to be underwater,” Dolin relates. “At the same time, I started doing more geometric work to create order, I suspect.”

Dolin’s work is displayed in private and public collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Federal Reserve Bank, and Progressive Corporation. In 2001, she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Award and later won a residency experience at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is the root of her attraction to painting Cape Cod houses and what eventually led to her photographing and recreating scenes from her former studio in Cleveland’s ArtCraft Building.

Her window view overlooked an old commercial and residential area that she captured with abstract pieces. “The housing shapes—the rectangles and triangles—were geometric in many ways, and when I started doing my pandemic paintings, I like to call them, I relayed it back to more still life and recognizable subject matter,” she says.

Meanwhile, playing with colorways has been a consistent approach throughout Dolin’s studio art career: “My main interest in art has been the use of color and what I can do with it.”

JUDSON SMART LIVING HOWSON & STREETER GALLERIES
1801 Chestnut Hills Drive
Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44106
judsonsmartliving.org
216.791.2885

EVENTS

Bonnie Dolin: Paintings, through July 18