ARTISTS STATEMENT & BIO

ARTIST’S STATEMENT:

“Whoever said that the world is a serious place hasn’t found the road I travel. As a visual journalist intrigued by culture and the human condition, mine is a path that runs contrary to the humorless and the mundane. My art is infused with mischievous wit, occasional absurdity, yet always with noticeable affection. I try to catch life in that space between blinks where busy inhabitants of their own interior landscapes are momentarily lost to the exterior world. I leave the viewer to explore what lies behind the eyes, the soul, and the heart of the work. Signature patterning is a recurring theme in many of my paintings. You should be forewarned. This work has the capacity to change the way you think about art. And about life.”

New York City born Miki Boni began her career in Manhattan’s East Village drawing street portraits. With an insatiable appetite for travel and love of the camera, she has amassed image bank material that she dips into frequently for inspiration, either for her paintings or her digitography. Trained as a classical portraitist, Boni chose instead to take an expressionistic route. It is a more spirited approach to reality, sometimes humorous, sometimes enigmatic, but always with at least one foot grounded in a recognizable universe. She lived in Mexico as a working artist. “There, and in Russia, I was deeply influenced by surrealism and, in Japan, by minimalism. Each place I’ve visited or lived has deeply influenced my art and my life. In Mexico, the colors were totally unreserved; in the Northeast, they were muted; In Florida, the colors and forms were taken from the sea and the sunshine". Now in Chattanooga, her work is beginning to reflect her urban surroundings. Widely exhibited and in private collections in Mexico, Europe and the US, Boni is the first American woman painter whose work was selected to be part of a permanent collection at Museo Ateneo Cultural in Nayarit, Mexico. She was recently elected to Washington DC's National League of American Pen Women for her accomplishments in the visual arts. In addition to painting, she is also a published photographer and writer. In 2006, she and her husband, artist Tom Paulsin, visited Chattanooga and fell immediately in love with the City. Through an ArtsMove incentive program, they moved here from Florida’s Gulf Coast. These urban pioneers have been happily living and working on the City’s Southside since 2007.