About

About The Artist

Artist and Photographer Bonnie Follett was born in the Midwest United States, but has lived in San Francisco most of her life. Although appreciating the beauty of country and rural life, she still loves the diversity and activity of city life the best.  She has also lived in Minnesota, the Southwest (Arizona) and also spent a brief 3 months in London during her college years.

self portrait photo
Self portrait from about 1980, the early days in San Francisco.

Her artistic progression has been a bit wiggly waggly – veering between drawing and painting and photography, anything that helped her capture moments of  beauty or the interesting details and aspects of the natural world.

Sometimes leaning towards the dark, sometimes leaning towards the light or even humorous, her work is varied in nature.  In life you are always learning, and her work reflects this.

The photo on this page is a self portrait from her early days in San Francisco. Doesn’t everyone prefer more youthful photos of themselves?  Sags, bags and lines just don’t cut it in 2019. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Artist Statement

CurrentIy I enjoy working and manipulating images to add my expression and my take on the things I see and feel.  If I take a photograph, I almost always “want to make it better.” What I see in my mind seems to not always translate into the actual image without a little “fiddling” on it. I have a strong sense of color and prefer my colors strong and clear but not too extreme.  Color and light seems to move me more than any particular form or object. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder though, and I am sometimes surprised at which images will resonate with any particular person.

I come from a concrete background of paper and canvas, pencils and art pens,  paint and brushes, frames and mats and physical reality art things and tools.  But now I find myself concentrating more on things that don’t take up so much physical storage space.  This happens when you live too long. So I now enjoy working with the digital photography and digital tools. I can still express myself but don’t have to go figure out physical space for storing the results!

Of course every artist or photographer hopes to sell their wares if possible, but that is generally not a very lucrative experience for most of us, thus the term “starving artist.”  I do have some artwork on canvas, watercolor paper and lithographs for those that like or collect “originals,” but I also have a growing body of work that is available for print on high quality archival materials.  So you can find me on Fine Art America and Pixels.com (basically the same entity using my same image uploads, but with slightly different presentation and products available). I know, that’s a little confusing. But people can use whichever site most appeals to them.

I am also starting to place images and designs on RedBubble.com which has a more varied line of products, including some fairly inexpensive products like stickers, photo prints, posters and art boards.  Their clothing line is more extensive than FAA/Pixels which only offers t-shirts.  Anyway, it’s a fun site for shoppers to browse for one-of-a-kind artsy stuff to brighten up their lives.

Some people think an “artist statement” should delve into the mysterious territory of how an artist’s mind works and where they look to for inspiration.  I’m not sure what to say about that.  And maybe someday I’ll write more about how the circumstances of my life have affected my artistic outlook.  But if you want to psychoanalyze the artist, I have a general purpose blog called Bonnie Follett’s Blog on WordPress, as well as the new art gallery blog being started on this site. Maybe you can figure me out. I haven’t been successful with that.  🙂

See my Links page for my other sites and social media links.

Thanks for visiting!

Bonnie