Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba

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Self-Portraits – Natasha Boone

This image advertises Natasha Boone’s show of oil paintings. Along the right side, against a strip of acid yellow, is the artist’s name in red capitalized font. The rest of the poster displays a close-up detail of her painting: free, messy brushstrokes combine black, grey, and white, with a hint of yellow. Across the middle in acid yellow and red is the show title: SELF-PORTRAITS. A square of light grey provides a background for the show information in plain black font, reading “OPENS APRIL 1 2022 aanm.ca/online-exhibitions AND 102-329 Cumberland Ave. WPG.” The image includes logos for Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba and Canada Council For The Arts.

BIO

Natasha Boone is a writer, artist and illustrator based out of Winnipeg, MB, Treaty 1 Territory. Using oils, acrylics and found mixed media, her paintings highlight the difficulty of living with ill health, and the resulting dis/association of her body to herself. Likewise, having been inspired by Yayoi Kusama and her use of mirrors in emphasizing body distortion, Natasha likewise employs image deconstructualization to convey the frustration of living in a defunct body. She is published in The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine, 10th Edition, and is also a feature writer for The Mighty. She has exhibited in alternative and artist-run centers throughout the city of Winnipeg and is the recipient of a Manitoba Arts Grant for her graphic novel, ‘How I Contracted Hep C and Other Bedtime Stories’.

STATEMENT

Natasha Boone’s work explores the emotions behind being a “lifer” (chronically ill able/disabled person), and the subsequent “othering” that occurs due to having such a diagnosis. Her paintings are large and expressive.
Natasha is a three-time kidney transplant patient, with a cumulative of twelve years on dialysis. Her health dis/ability has brought challenge in life, but likewise has uniquely permitted her an opportunity to live ‘outside normative societal expectations’. In that sense then, she is free to be ‘other’, to use thick brushwork to “speak loudly” in her art.
During this time of COVID-19, the potential of contracting an illness became a threat to everyone, with even the healthy having to stop and acknowledge a sense of body-fragility. This idea of being “out of control” however, is a familiar one to any individual already living with a life-impacting illness. Having been diagnosed with chronic renal failure since before she could hold a pencil, Natasha has spent a lifetime of drawing – Her work wrestles with health and identity, and of how to live well and fully despite – or because of – such body-uncertainty. This tension is crucial to her work.
And especially important in this time in our history.
Natasha paints sizable, bold pieces on hand-stretched canvas. Drawing inspiration from the modernist artist Georgia O’Keeffe, she hopes that: if I paint large enough, (surely) someone ought to listen.

Some works are available for purchase, please contact info@aanm.ca to inquire.  To view more of Natasha Boone’s work, go to http://www.instagram.com/natasha.boone.paints

This is an abstracted painting, a self-portrait of the artist. The colour palette is minimal. On a scrambled white and light grey background, the artist’s face looks directly forward, at the viewer. The face borrows the same white as the background. Features are simplistic, quickly sketched in black drybrush line. Indeed, all we see are two uneven dots for eyes, a long one-dimensional nose, two bright spots on the cheeks, and scruffy straight black lines of hair.Self Portrait In White   2017   47 x 30   oil   NFS

This is an abstracted painting, a self-portrait of the artist. The most notable feature is the use of rough, exaggerated brush strokes, giving the whole piece a chaotic sense of movement. The artist’s head and neck are visible, a messy bit of bright red indicates lips. Two spots of canary yellow could be identified as eyes. Skin is bright white, with smears of grey and yellow thrust across with brushwork from the background, which is black, grey, and white. Paint use is bare and dry in some areas, and so thick that we can see globs of texture in others.
Self Portrait: The Artist Wears Yellow   2020   36 x 30   oil  $860
This is an abstracted painting, a self-portrait of the artist, from crown of head to collarbone. Skin tone is bright white, with some grey. Eyes are small black smudges, nose is a barely visible line. The mouth is prominent, a tomato red oval in the centre of the piece. Paint application is bare and dry in areas, in others it is thick and textural. The background is uneven black dry-brushed lines.
They Will Not Make Me Into Someone Whom I Am Not       2021   57 x 23   oil  NFS
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