Artist Mary Bonney heals through creating work for ‘Broken is a Beautiful Place to Start’

Though art education was lacking in her small country school in Missouri, Mary Bonney found a way to create.

Always doodling, Bonney worked on her art independently, using whatever she could find as art supplies.

“When you don’t have ‘proper materials,’ you figure out what else can work,” she said. “I did watercolor with my mom’s coffee. I remember doing that, playing around like, ‘Oh, look at this, this works as a pigment.’ ”

This self-guided training eventually earned Bonney a scholarship to attend a college in Missouri for art. In school, she learned the basics that other students already knew and began experimenting with paint and sculpture.

After college, she moved to St. Louis and began showing in galleries. Though she now had a formal art education, Bonney stuck with what she knew as an intuitive painter. She has painter friends who are in their studio every day, but that doesn’t work for her.

“For me, it’s a little more emotional,” she said. “I might be up at two in the morning painting because something hits me and it’s like, ‘I want to put this down on canvas.’ ”

In 2001, she opened her own gallery in New Orleans, where she’s lived and created ever since. Bonney turns away from opportunities to paint regional art that tourists purchase, like images of a saxophone player performing under street lamps, though she respects artists who make a living that way.

But again, it’s all about what she feels guided to paint. “What about this is worth painting?” Bonney will ask herself before beginning a project.

“If I can justify that in my own mind, or if I’m driven enough to put it down on canvas, then that’s when the magic happens for me.”

And when Bonney says “magic,” she means it, having developed a technique for a series of paintings that involved burning parts of the canvas and incorporating the burn marks into her work.

It may sound destructive, but Bonney said it was liberating.

“You paint a painting, you have this idea that it’s precious,” she said. “To take a nice painting and torch it was so freeing in a way.”

Bonney’s show for D2 Gallery, “Broken is a Beautiful Place to Start – A Woman’s Journey,” which opened Friday and runs through Feb. 28, won’t feature any of her torched work, but the show does represent a sort of rising from the ashes.

In January, Bonney, then a contract worker for the city of New Orleans, was working with Nathaniel Fields, the director of the city’s homeless services department, to transport people in need to an emergency shelter during cold weather.

Fields kissed Bonney and then continued harassing her, she said, including calling four times in 10 minutes, in the days following.

Bonney buried herself in her work with the homeless assistance program, but the incident brought up a lot of past trauma, including being raped as a teenager.

Fields was suspended without pay for three days after an investigation. Bonney’s contract with the city wasn’t renewed.

“It was a double whammy of like, ‘Wow, this sucks,’ and dealing with that and then realizing that, honestly, the aftermath from what happened when I was a teenager to now is not that different,” she said. “Women are still isolated. You’re still treated like you’ve done something wrong.

“Nobody knows what to say to you. There’s a real lapse in support. It was like, ‘Wow, 40 years later, and it’s not very different.’ ”

In processing both traumas, Bonney turned to her art, going through bursts of creativity but also taking a week or two at a time to stop and breathe. She can’t paint on cue, she said; she has to give her ideas time to simmer.

The lower third of “Tell Your Story” is streaked with deep red paint, with lighter shades on the upper two-thirds. She’s drawn circles arranged in two columns and has incorporated scraps of paper into the work.

Another work also features collage, including the message “Love Sucks” and pages of sheet music along with a mostly white canvas with shades of purple paint popping through.

Another piece is a diptych called “The Kiss.” One canvas features a floral painting and the word “kiss” cut from an old dictionary. The other canvas features a gray figure.

“It’s like ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ ” Bonney said. “Stuff happened to me and I felt ashamed, so something can be beautiful but also not.”

Other mixed media objects incorporated into these pieces include a hinge Bonney found and sewed to the canvas, photos and leaves. Bonney put another piece, a nude watercolor, in a shadow box that also includes a red marble able to roll back and forth to create tension for the viewer.

Bonney saw the pieces as representing her own personal inferno, encapsulating all the work she did to heal from her assaults, and the collection began to take shape in October.

“It was feeling a little fragmented, but so was I, then it just came together,” she said. “I’m really grateful for the process. That was one thing I really learned is you’ve got to trust the process. I know it’s such a trite saying. I mean, I had a deadline, so I was very aware of what I needed to do and when, but I also couldn’t force it … I had to let things come out as my brain processed everything and figured out a way to get it out there. It was something I could apply to other areas of my life. Just breathe and let things unfold.

“You can’t force anything. That was my biggest takeaway from putting this show together.”

And in viewing “Broken is a Beautiful Place to Start – A Woman’s Journey” and hearing her story, Bonney hopes the exhibition can encourage others going through similar infernos to do the same: Breathe and let things unfold.

“This year was a challenge for me, but it’s a topic that a lot of women deal with so if it helps somebody feel a little stronger, then that’s what I would hope for,” she said. “If telling this story helps somebody else, that makes all the difference to me.”