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Through watercolor, digital, and constructed works, Bonny Stauffer explores Granite Mountain as a living system shaped by season and relationship.
Bonny Stauffer has hiked Granite Mountain’s trails for 50 years, drawing and painting the mountain and the landscape at its base. More recently, her participation in the Natural History Institute (NHI) courses, workshops, and conferences has greatly increased her understanding and love for the natural world.
Where does the artist begin and end when composing an image of the landscape? How does one experience a particular mountain without considering its relationship to the universe in which it resides or to the smallest flowers that bloom on its slopes? How does the artist visually capture the awe and love that arise when experiencing the interrelationships in the natural world? The works in this exhibition represent a two-year visual exploration of these core questions.
The exhibition features new watercolor studies, digital paintings, and constructed paintings. Three newly constructed paintings and one suspended painting depict the mountain in four seasons. The process of art making begins with line and watercolor studies based on a specific location. These initial images are brought into Photoshop where other sketches and deep sky objects are combined to create more complex digital paintings. The digital paintings are the basis for the constructed paintings that are scaled up and interpreted into shaped and painted elements attached to layers of Plexiglas. Stauffer considers each of these three stages to be essential processes in order to capture her initial experience in nature; moving from awe and wonder, to compositional explorations, and finally to a viewer’s experience of physically layered space and form. The artworks that represent these three stages of development are considered to be finished works in themselves; each one is an attempt to capture the essence of the initial inspiration using their particular materials and art forms.
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