Constance Bonfy
A Creative Mind For Our Times
"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do"
Edgar Degas
In My Words
I grew up in an enchanted mid-century modern country club life of privilege, arts and accomplishment, glitzed with color—turquoise built-in appliances in a pink-brick home surrounded by a walled rose garden—all stylish in appearance. But while I was still in my early 20s, my brilliant parents made a conscious decision to leave the superficial lifestyle behind, and to the shock of the community, began what became their and my (by association) forty-years of community activism inspired by exploration of how others live and how we might all live together.
As a socially-engaged artist, I now have a 25+ year history of community practice investigating art’s responsibility to the social- and eco-spheres that affects the public in a deep, meaningful way. Acting as practicing artist and pot-stirring community-based impresario, I collaborate with community and other artists to create multi-year and multi-disciplined performance examinations and installations of the impact of man on the earth, most passionately my prairie home. In my studio, I am driven to artistically delve into the social issues of limited resources and inequality/greed--by painting colorful people and their stories through observational expression of social/ecological challenges and most recently, in collaboration with a local apiarist BEe Hopper, activism in multimedia printmaking works exploring the plight of bees.
