THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE By John A. Parks as featured in American Artist magazine, April 2002

Bonnie Case's small-scale watercolors feel like snapshots of life as it was meant to be: rich, engaging, pleasurable, and full of all things good. In Tomatoes With Alhambra Pattern, a group of brilliant, deep-red plum tomatoes rests on a translucent blue-green glass plate, which itself sits on a tile pattern. In another, four chili peppers lie wrinkled and dried on a heavily decorated plate. In Mexican Box -- Gift From a Friend, a box is decorated with images of red peppers is set on a blue-checkered cloth on which stand two impossibly orange oranges. The results are sumptuous and warm -- a sensuous feast of color and pattern almost overwhelming in its saturation and density. "I think about the paintings as vignettes, little corners of my life where things seem to be just right," Case says. "I paint subjects that speak to me -- things I really care about." Often, she depicts her favorite foods or small gifts -- a jug or a box or a plate -- that a relative or friend has picked up in some distant part of the world. "It provides a warm focus for me," she remarks. "A gift is a token of affection, and it stays as a reminder." The artist usually paints in a sunny corner of her house and finds every step of the creative process to be completely pleasurable. The English essayist William Hazlitt once wrote that the art of pleasing consists in being pleased, and certainly the joys that inspire and inhabit Case's work stem from her four lifelong sources of pleasure: patterns from all over the world, gardening, food, and landscape. The passion Case feels for patterns began soon after completing her fairly traditional art school years, when she began to do ceramics, embroidery, and knitting. "I knitted with everything imaginable," she recalls, "rope, string, metallic yarn -- you name it." Soon she found herself doing what she calls "wearble art": vests and jackets using appliques, textured and heavily patterned fabrics, and embroidery, all of which she sold through an upscale Madison Avenue shop in New York City, Julie: Artisans' Gallery. Case's interest in pattern grew as she became fascinated by the wealth of design in Indian miniatures, Native American textiles, Islamic tile, Persian carpets, Art Deco design, and Southwestern pottery -- indeed, pattern wherever she saw it. More and more pattern found its way into her work, and eventually, she established a successful knitwear company in the competitive world of New York City fashion. "The early sweaters were very rich," she notes. "Everything was hand-knitted, textured, and encrusted with decorative baubles. Later, when fashions became more minimal, I did more subtle things with color, texture, and pattern." The artist's abiding love of gardening began at an early age. After she married, she turned a succession of backyards into virtual paradises, even though she never had formal training as a gardener. Finally, for a few months lasst year, Case worked under some garden professionals, at the Stonecrop Garden in Cold Spring, New York, and enjoyed the experience immensely. As for her interest in food, that too began after Case married. "I love shopping for vegetables and fruits," she says, adding that looking at nature's fresh colors and textures always inspires her art. She likens her love of cooking, serving, and presenting her food to her other passions, explaining, "It's the same thing as my knitting and painting -- my need to present something absolutely dripping with pleaure." Case's fondness for observing and painting landscape is more recent. "Really," she comments, "it's an extension of a sense of place, of trying to describe, in watercolor, the pleasure of being in a particular location." In communicating her message, this watercolorist's technique is deliberately simple. She uses a single round sable brush with a Winsor & Newton set of 12 half-pan colors on a 6" x 4" cold-pressed watercolor block. She begins with graphite line drawings before working directly in washes. "I mix the paint on the palette in the paint-box lid. In fact," she notes, "one of the things I love about watercolor is that I can take it out wherever I am, use it, and put it away again very easily, without setting up an elaborate studio." Although Case's work is highly representational, it is not realism that drives her art. In describing her objective, she says, "I like painting objects so that they abut each other and come up to the surface. I take the painting all the way to the edge so that it produces a precious jewel-like result in the end." An extraordinary characteristic of her pictures is how large and grand a world they suggest on such a modest scale, almost as though observers are being shown just a tiny corner, a view through a keyhole, of a lavish and wondrous place. Her paintings also convey the sense of a diary, records of perfect moments. In some of her recent work, Case has even included writing. Images of individual flowers are accompanied by densely written text describing the plant and the artist's realtionship with it: who gave it to her, how she looked after it, how it grew and bloomed, and so on. Once again the viewer is wrapped up in a joyous intimacy with the artist and her subject.

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