He wanted a moment from the final sequence of the Apartment where (spoiler alert) Jack Lemmon’s character finally expresses his love for Shirley MacClaine’s character and the only way we know how she feels about him, is by her facial expression as well as how she takes the cards from him.
This is a recent piece I did of Steve Martin from the poster for the Jerk, for an old friend. It is a perfect example of the extreme jump from one form of painting to another. On the one hand, the end goal of a detailed likeness (and doing a good job of it) to the freedom of creating shapes and using color without that particular pressure, just the joy of it AND the goal to do a good job of it (still considering the formal issues of the aesthetics of abstracts from what little I know of art history). I’m still informally a student of it.
To make the abstract (which is around 24″ x 36″), my rule of thumb is to do my best to make the colors and shapes somehow “fit” organically without giving in to the desire to make the shapes and forms “representational,” I inevitably will see things that resemble objects or familiar images. Some of those I may allow to stay in the final depending on how they work together with the rest of the piece.
Chris Bonno’s development as an artist has paralleled his work as an improviser, actor and comedian. With the art work being ongoing, his career as a performer has consisted of numerous appearances on tv shows and films as well as years featuring as a standing up comedian in clubs in New York, Vegas, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles and Canada.
Playing with shapes and colors, Bonno chuckles when he explains to Janice Bremec Blum that he loves the “f…k it factor.” Basically, that means going mad in his own world and giving himself permission to be loose. That freeing spirit is found in all of Bonno’s work. “I don’t leave a painting until I believe in it” he says, “until it impresses me.”
I would be up late, take a break from painting and then brainstorm. Situations for tomatoes, odd places you might not find them, personifying events with tomatoes… what painting would be next?
Then an idea would make me laugh and I would suss it out to see if I thought it was a strong laugh… then run inside, sketch and plan it out or paint it.
