Bonnie Sucec

The work of Bonnie Sucec tells a powerful story about the artist and the fascinating environment that cultivates her images. Her own words reveal her private sensibility and offer insight into her work. “I like to think that my paintings have content and tell stories – even make social comment. I don’t want them to be too light. They’ve got to have a little substance; they are not just color, shape, and whimsy. I like matches – both their shape and their function. Strike a match and set something on fire. I had a match collection when I was a kid, but my mother made me cut all the matches out because they were dangerous. “My animals have such a nice variety of shape and sizes and they don’t have to be real. I like the colors and positions, and I can make them up. Their particular characteristics don’t appeal to me as much as their overall shapes. The animals I’ve been painting lately are confrontations. They are set up in tense situations, looking at each other. I want them doing something.” Like the Chicago Imagists, Sucec has a profound sense of the painter’s craft. She works her surfaces and then reworks them to perfection. Her sense of craftsmanship belies the apparent crudity of her subject matter. She leans toward the expression of introverted states of mind, ruminations in fantasy, highly personal idiosyncratic mythologies, and subversive, even anti-social sentiment. Sucec’s various college experiences have all influenced her narrative style. She says about her study of sculpture: “One thing nice about sculpture was I didn’t have to learn how to weld and chisel and all those traditional things. If it couldn’t be glued or taped I was doomed. I can draw anything I want to, it just takes me a long time. You can get lazy and skip that part and then the abstract work is pretty flat, if you don’t know how to see. There is a lot of abstract work that’s very surface – it’s not very interesting. I really work on my surfaces. All your work says what you know about art, how you use color, what you know about shape; the ideas are all right there.” Above all Sucec loves images. She works in Salt Lake, perhaps because she thrives on the struggle for personal narrative cultivated in a place that forces her to be alone, thus refining and intensifying her inward vision; or perhaps because Salt Lake can be, even to a painter, a fascinating, turbulent, even strangely thrilling place to work in, to collide with. “I have a couple of drawings that are my headache drawings. I have lots of migraine headaches, so I paint lots of animals with head injuries or their heads popping off. It looks more interesting to me. I was in Ecuador three years ago. I felt kin spirits with all that South American magic. It was won￾derful. My parents have a home in Mexico. I guess I’m really influenced by the sense of decoration – I like color and animals and magic. I don’t know much about magic, but it’s great when something wonderful happens that you can’t explain.” (Adapted from “Acting Out,” exhibition notes by Gayle Weyher; in