Dusti Bongé abstract sketches

More insights into the creative mind of Dusti Bongé as we look at another of Dusti Bongé’s abstract sketches this week thanks to our friends at the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation in Biloxi, MS. Interesting experimentations with space and color and movement. Analysis, as always, comes from Dusti Bongé Art Foundation Executive Director Ligia M. Römer.

Dusti Bongé, Winsor Wirebound Sketch Books, p.11, c. 1980, mixed media on paper, 6” x 9

Continuing on last week’s theme of carrying around a sketchbook and recharging your creativity, here is a work from one of Dusti Bongé’s later sketchbooks. The 1980s were an incredibly fruitful decade for Dusti. She created some stunning large canvases and numerous smaller compositional explorations on paper. 

This sketch offers an interesting composition with very clearly defined elements. Compared to the vast gestural marks of Dusti’s abstract expressionist works with colors layered upon one another, intermingling and melding together, here we have a work with a certain degree of restraint and clearly distinguishable shapes. In this particular instance, the colors are being brought together by placing them in close proximity to one another, but distinguishing each shade clearly from the others. 

Set against a mottled green background, the small bursts of color, ranging from yellow to orange, red, blue, purple, and pink, appear to be relegated to their own rectangular precincts. Loosely outlined with black boundaries, these distinct color elements are also randomly filled with sinewy black marks dancing through them, occasionally escaping their boundaries. All together the piece offers a kind of hieroglyphic quality, with the clearly defined color elements and their unique inner markings all neatly arranged in a rather structured pattern.

Just another way for Dusti to “think on paper” and explore new compositions and ways of working with colors.