Dusti Bongé poem and drawing

A treat this week as part of See Great Art’s partnership with the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation in Biloxi, MS: a poem by Bongé to accompany the artwork. DBAF Executive Director Ligia M. Römer shares the specifics.

Dusti Bongé, There is a Place, 1975, pen & ink on paper, 11” x 8 1/8”

This week’s landscape work by Dusti Bongé offers a very different approach on her part to ‘representing’ nature. Created two decades after Oak Trees in Bloom, this piece, although still very abstract, nonetheless has some recognizable tree-like forms in it, with trunks, roots and foliage. 

Dusti here takes full advantage of the felt tip pen and its unique characteristic as a medium to capture these exotic specimens. These highly stylized trees are not clearly identifiable by species, but they are likely some kind of palm species like the Pindo Palm or Windmill Palm.

The verticality of their elongated ovoid trunks is emphasized by, and juxtaposed against, the horizontal brown bands which grow more and more pronounced higher up, where the new growth is.

Similarly, the sky which the trees are set against is also defined by tightly spaced horizontal pen strokes ranging from green to blue to pink to reflect the many subtle colors of the sky. It's as if Dusti is reflecting the changing hues of the sky over the course of the day, rather than presenting us with one static moment.

The “place” Dusti is referring to is also not a specific, known, identifiable spot on a map, but rather the general experience of being in the South Mississippi woods along the Tuxachanie River. Thus, what Dusti is expressing here is what one could genuinely call a “sense of place.”

Dusti wrote an accompanying poem for this work which goes as follows:

There is a place.

neither here nor there,

with unfamiliar trees.

Their Names I do not know,

Strange, beautiful, and exciting,

I walk among the fallen leaves—–unafraid.