Dusti Bongé from Ogden Museum of Southern Art
A major departure this week from the Dusti Bongé Biloxi, MS seafood industry and harbor scenes we’ve been enjoying in recent weeks. Additionally exciting, this artwork comes from one of my favorite museums in America: the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
Dusti Bongé had a long relationship with New Orleans, and it was at the Ogden where I first became aware of Dusti’s work. The museum owns a spectacular, focused collection of Southern art with a concentration on self-taught artists. It also hosts spectacular special exhibitions.
Analysis of the artwork comes from Dusti Bongé Art Foundation Executive Director Ligia M. Römer.
Dusti Bongé, Hoar Frost in Vienna Woods, 1958, oil on canvas, 37 ½” x 59 ½”. Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
A beautiful abstract painting by Dusti Bongé from the collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. It was a gift of the Foundation to the Museum in 2002. We will share more works from various museum collections over the next several weeks.
As the title indicates, Dusti here offers us an abstract interpretation of the phenomenon of hoar frost, which occurs under specific cold conditions. It is a type of frost with a feathery quality that forms on exposed grass, branches, stems and leaves of trees and plants, or on wires and lines.
Hoar frost happens when very moist cold air reaches its frost point. The water vapor in the air comes into contact with small diameter exposed solid surfaces that are already below freezing. This results in the water vapor immediately condensing into ice, specifically, very fine icy crystals that almost look like white hair.
This painting is an excellent example of how Dusti would render a particular experiences or observation into a completely abstract composition that nonetheless evokes the essence of said experience. It is what imbues many of the paintings she did in Biloxi their unique sense of place.
With titles hinting at storms, hurricanes, water, and sea, her works give universal expression to very particular phenomena. In this work the almost monochromatic color palette ranges from whites to grays to delicate traces of black, and is only barely accented with some very pale blues.
The brush strokes are an ingenious mix of broad vertical marks broken up by delicate angular hairline traces. All together, these colors and expressive gestures indeed conjure a cold icy quality that is nonetheless of exquisite beauty.
