Welcome to
Bonnie Spiegel Paintings
I can hardly remember when I didn't want to be an artist.
Making art, seeing art, reading and talking about art—that's what makes life good for me. While lately I've been focusing my energies on painting portraits of people and their pets, the landscape that surrounds me where I live in Portland, Maine, is a continuing source of inspiration. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
But no matter what the subject—ocean, the marsh outside my studio, flowers in a still life, my goldfish or my poodle, friend or commission—my interests as a figurative artist revolve around questions concerning perception and reality. It seems to me that there's a constant flux going on in whatever visual field I'm presented with. The harder I look, the more I see, and the more I see, the more elusive the reality before me becomes. With the limitations and the vagaries of my human eye, my certainty melts. Small visual shifts occur. Unnoticed before, things begin to happen—relationships between shapes and colors multiply, edges tend to soften or may almost disappear. I continually have to reassess what I'm looking at. Describing those experiences, trying to pin down the bazillions of facets that make up my visual reality is what absorbs me most.
Because I enjoy sharing what I've learned as an artist, I like to teach. I've taught courses in drawing, calligraphy, pastels, painting and portraiture at my studio as well as through the continuing education departments at the University of Southern Maine, the Maine College of Art, Colby College and the University of New England. Listed with the Maine Arts Commission,as a Juried Education Artist, I've also traveled the state working with children in our public schools.
I've been fortunate to have my work shown and collected here in Maine, nationally and in Europe. Art-making, essentially an act of communication, begins as a monologue. And when sent out to the larger world, it becomes
dialogue. I invite you to become part of the conversation.