Bonnie McArthur

Bonnie McArthur is an emerging Canberra based artist focused on immortalising deserved subjects in a romantic light that displays their beautiful spirits for all to see. McArthur is influenced by renaissance paintings of a romantic aesthetic and sculpts miniature fantastical lands in her spare time. Early artistic influences stemmed in romantic idealism and moral self-sufficiency beliefs lead McArthur to live primarily off her occupation as a portrait artist, having painted professional portraits by commission for the public since she was 21. However her recent work has acknowledged the presence of abstract forms within realism, moving towards the truth of hyper realism, turning her back on classical idealism. At the completion of her degree McArthur intends to travel Australia, living in her bus, promoting her portraiture business as a means for living minimally, and self-sufficiently in-line with her theories surrounding current environmental resource declines, and her refusal to apply wilful ignorance to her knowledge of still present human and animal suffering in the 21st century. McArthur also works artistically within the realms of sculpture, drawing and etching, though she specialises in traditional oil layering techniques and acrylics.