BIOGRAPHY

Years of practice, experimentation and multiple reinventions have shaped Bonnie Weir’s evocative, sometimes mysterious paintings. Inspired by Eastern, American and European abstract stylizations, her work reflects a grounding and authenticity, refreshing and distinct in our current contemporary art culture. Conceptually more than visually, Weir embraces the abstract expressionist mind set in the tradition of Mark Rothko, Deborah Remington and Agnes Martin. The natural and fantastic imagery she provides metaphorically depicts and characterizes various life experiences and sensations. Weir’s intention as a self-proclaimed Transcendental Modernist is to evoke in her audience a form of meditative spiritual transcendence or a reflection on our existence.

Bonnie Weir (Fetcenko) was born in rural Pennsylvania, but has lived and studied in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwestern United States and Toronto, Canada. Her cultural identity is rooted in an eastern European tradition of craftsmen and women who basically lived off the land in rural Pennsylvania as carpenters, coal miners, textile workers, hunters and farmers. Raised in a conservative Midwestern Catholic family, Weir had an unusual fascination at an early age with esoteric thinking and the supernatural, in addition to her love of art and nature. 

As a young woman living in Canada, the contrast of the cosmopolitan atmosphere with her visits to the Lake Muskoka region provided ample inspiration for her plein air painting. The Algonquin school, predominantly Lauren Harris, one member of the Group of Seven also impacted her work.
In the Pacific Northwest, Weir studied life drawing with Ken Spiering and watercolor with Stan Miller, as she regularly started to show her work locally, affirming her artistic path.

After her move back to the Midwest she studied under Joseph Canzani and other faculty members steeped in the Bauhaus tradition at the Columbus College of Art & Design. 

On completing a large series of landscape watercolor illustrations and the dance art series she was introduced to traditional Japanese textile design and this laid the groundwork for The Floating World exhibition. 

Bonnie Weir continues her self-fulfilling conviction in the studio, entertaining her passion for nature and the supernatural and creating works of art rich in energy, beauty and intrigue. Bonnie Weir currently resides in Birmingham, Michigan.