The Freedom to Keep Evolving


Take the best of your dog’s personality, sprinkle it with the humor from Miki Boni’s painting style and you’ll have a portrait that will make you smile every time you look at it.


From the artist’s “Dogs, Cats & All Those Hats” series: Bonnie & Clyde (left) and Winston Furchill (right).


M


This issue’s cover artist is Miki Boni. Since 2006, every cover of The New Barker Dog Magazine has featured an original work of art by a different artist.


While there is definitely a dog on the cover, it is the first time we’ve included a cat, thanks to Miki’s artistic sense of humor. We wanted to remind everyone that laughter is the best medicine.


54 THE NEW BARKER


iki Boni calls herself a student of character. She has been studying and painting faces of both humans and animals most of her life. Working mostly in oils,


Miki will sometimes purposely distort her subjects in her portraits as a way to surprise the viewer’s perception of other- wise ordinary imagery. A native of Brooklyn, New York, she spent years living in


Mexico as a working artist. She is the first American woman painter whose work was chosen to be part of a permanent collection at Museo Ateneo Cultural in Nayarit, Mexico. Although trained as a classical portraitist, there, and in Russia, she was deeply influenced by surrealism and in Japan, by minimalism. In Mexico, the colors are totally unreserved, in the Northeast, they are muted. In Florida, the colors and forms are taken from the sea and the sunshine. Upon her return from Mexico, Boni’s work has been exhibited at Lincoln Center’s Cork Gallery. Listed in Who’s Who of American Women, she was elected to Washington DC's National League of American Pen Women for her accomplishments in the visual arts. Boni relocated to Florida in 2001, as one of the original


settlers in the Village of the Arts, the Gulf Coast’s largest artist’s enclave in Bradenton. She was responsible for creating that City’s popular public art event, The GeckoFest. As the recipient of an artist’s grant in Chattanooga, she now


splits her time between Tennessee and Florida. What follows is an interview with Miki, in her own words.


www.TheNewBarker.com


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