Mary Bonkemeyer

I’d like to introduce myself. I am Mary Bonkemeyer, and I was born in North Carolina. From there to the University of Iowa, where I received a Master’s degree and met some very fine artists. I’ve been living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the last ten years, and if I were to identify myself as an artist, it would be as a poet/ painter or a painter/poet.

And I’d like to think of myself as having intentions that arise from the heart, rather than the head. The unintended consequences of the process that I go through, I think, would be similar to the poet’s in that you discover what you want to say through accidents and what I like to think of as gifts. But the gift comes from the material, and when the intention of the heart works with the material, it is just great. Of course, if you are working from the heart, you are fueled by passion, rather than a computerized, calculated schematic process that your head guides you through. And we hope that our politicians will get over that soon.

There is a fine line between genius and who hasn’t a clue, some sage intoned, and I like to stick with the one who doesn’t have a clue (laughter) and stay open to these wonderful gifts and accidents that the material affords you. And so I like to get right in there with the material. ... and the unpredicted and the unpredictable.

I have just run across a photograph of the heart and its frequencies in its computerized pattern around the body. And I like to think of these frequencies as somehow being connected with the earth. Everyone has this kind of heart frequency, and it’s a lot to think about in two minutes, but it’s all there and it is something I enjoy thinking about.

I’ve been struggling all my life with the idea of trying to define what it means --the difference between the literal and the poet, and to what extent reality and the literal are somehow the opposite. And this brings us to the definition of words, and I was thinking about power  as a word taken literally is all about cowboys and governments exploiting people (I didn’t mean to get political so fast, but here I am). And power is really, I think, and the powerful ...... the real definition of power is to give up power and is to be able to give up power, I should say, and embrace the other...the opposite of power becomes the reality of power. 

Mary Bonkemeyer.  Painter/poet.  Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A.  Ms. Bonkemeyer studied with Philip Guston and worked with Richard Diebenkorn and Nancy Graves.  She thinks of her paintings “as traces or marks that weave together, quiver, alternate, and slowly the eye registers and reads an unrepeatable pattern.  There are no objects, only places—places where some little thing is coming into being”. 

http://www.marybonkemeyer.com