Bonnie Minardi loves chickens and roosters. I love the way she paints them. Bonnie is intrigued by the unique personalities of these birds. Sometimes they are sassy, some are sweet and some are just curious. She calls their bright festive colors “feather fashion”.
Recently I sat down with Bonnie and listened to her describe how she uses paint to illustrate and capture her artful bird portraits. Her goal is to capture the personality of the bird before her. “I use texture as a way to express the beauty of the chickens. I like to use both warm and cool colors to play off one another and give the chicken dimension.”
Bonnie begins her paintings by creating a surface rich with texture, sometimes with a gel medium and sometimes with paper. In her current work she adds additional layers of color to which she is drawn. One more final layer of color covers all of this. She calls this final layer her background color. While the background color is still wet she scrapes down into the paint to reveal some of the colors underneath. At this point she is ready to sketch and paint her chicken.
And this is how we, the viewer, are introduced to a little attitude from Nico, with his charcoal body in contrast to the yellows and golds behind him. Lizzie is more docile with her black polka dotted neck and belly, pretty topknot with a splash of red which matches those barn red textures as her background.
Bonnie is opening up her studio to the public during the Santa Cruz Country Open Studios Art Tour. Catch her on the weekends of October 12 & 13 and October 19 & 20.
