Focused in Faces and Facial Expressions

For the past 11 years Marion Bolognesi has lived in Brooklyn. She says being a New Yorker is an addiction. “Great to break free here and there but it’s very easy to become accustomed to the advantages of big city life, especially as an artist. There’s inspiration everywhere you turn.”  Bolognesi is a fashion and accessory designer. She sketches at work using inspiration from other artists and fashion that she finds on the internet but her personal passion is in her watercolors. She works in the evening on her paintings, setting her goal at one watercolor a week. 

Her paintings are solely created to satisfy herself capturing an emotional feeling.  While in college, she was required to draw and paint about ideas that were assigned by professors. This caused her to realize there are a variety of subject matters that don’t interest her. Since then she has been “hyper focused in faces and facial expressions.”  Marion loves watercolor as a medium but it is important to her not to jeopardize the characteristics of the medium. She states, “With each piece I try at some point to relinquish control of the watercolor and let it steer itself. I definitely feel that my best works are true collaborations between myself and the paint.”

Her artwork has been exhibited internationally. Marion is currently working on a new series of portraits.  She challenges herself to create artwork with the same composition of the “gaze” with depicting different moods through expression and color.  Marion Bolognesi’s watercolor Remember, creates an illusion of a face emerging from a white background. The eyes seem to tell the story. The gaze pulls the viewer into the painting to look deeper. The drips look accidental, they are not, she controls the paint to support the feeling being conveyed.

It has been said that the eyes are the windows of our souls. To view more watercolors by Marion Bolognesi visit: http://www.marion-b.com.

 —Nicole Bossert

Nicole Bossert is a graduate student at Buffalo State College studying Art Education. She graduated from the University at Buffalo with a BFA in Communication Design.