Ingleby | Wings of a Butterfly

“I have my subjects all at hand. I go see them. I take notes. And then I go home. And before painting, I think, I dream.”

- Pierre Bonnard, 1942

“Bonnard’s bath paintings blew me away when I first saw them on an art school trip to Paris in 1991 (a bus from Aberdeen). Paintings as dream, floating ephemeral watery dream, Marthe’s body sometimes barely visible, as if there had been a fusion at a molecular level of bath and person… [Picasso’s] Guernica is a great painting and arguably more important than any of Bonnard’s bath paintings, but I don’t think about Guernica much. I think about Bonnard every time I’m in a bathroom.”

- Andrew Cranston

“Bonnard is a painter who is present, attentive, and always open to new information revealing itself to him. His depiction of light, and the abundance of colours that ground his paintings in a particular locale, has enriched my own perspective on capturing the specificity of time and place. Whether drawn from memory, imagination, or the dreamscape of the subconscious, his work resonates with this essence.”

- Helena Foster 

“Where do I start ? The panoramic seeing, the tablecloths, the tiles in the bathroom? The nude laying back on the bed - he never doesn’t astonish me with his new way of seeing -the light that is colour, Marthe’s bent head or her high heels in the bathroom, or some plum pits on a plate - his every day.”

- Chantal Joffe

“Bonnard is a colour genius – it oozes out of his paintings, seeping through cracks, layered, and blended in a kind of luminous harmony. His textures ripple, there is a fluidity, the works are alive.”

- Sophia Loeb

"I first saw a Bonnard when I was 18 on a college trip to London. I was anticipating seeing his work in particular, as I had a postcard of one of his paintings in my sketchbook, and I had a dream about trying to see and touch them, they were so beautiful. They didn’t disappoint. I felt so excited at all the possibilities in painting. 

 

I recently looked at Bonnard at the museum D’Orsay in Paris, and experienced again that profound joy of looking at what we sometimes can’t see -the absolute beauty of life in it’s stillness, every dayness imbued with this aura of feeling, dream-like."

- Lorna Robertson 

“Bonnard is a supreme example of what I’m most interested in: painting what something feels like, rather than what it looks like. All his subjects are imbued with the uniqueness of perception, capturing the simple but extraordinary fact of being alive. I see his use of colour as being inseparable from subject and form - a way of thinking with paint: a diffused scattering of brush marks, often built up to a crescendo of resting, more opaque, areas of pigment.”

- Phoebe Unwin