For more than a decade, artist and sculptor Bonnie Jean Malcolm of Essex, Massachusetts, was my articulate, steadfast, inspiring penpal.
She finally died, at the age of 100, recently, and like countless others across America and around the world, I miss her and her heartfelt, well-informed take on all things aesthetic and intellectual.
It all started a year or so after I’d finished my brief tenure as Coordinator of AAGNE (the Abstract Artists’ Group of New England), a specialty group within the Newburyport Art Association.
Bonnie Jean was a longtime member of that group, and it was my good fortune to have become Coordinator while she was there.
One of my most memorable encounters with her was at the annual AAGNE exhibit always staged at the Newbury Art Association. Long after leaving the group, I continued to make a point of going to that exhibit and paying my respects to her.On that day I stepped into the NAA lobby, looked across the large crowd of attendees—AAGNE exhibits always drew—and indeed continue to draw—large, enthusiastic audiences—and spotted her from far across the room. She was always beautifully dressed, exquisitely groomed, and inherently, inescapably artful in appearance.
“What a beautiful medallion you’re wearing!” I shouted on the way to catching up with her.
“Not really a medallion,” she said. “I saw a crushed and disfigured soda can on the street one day here in Newburyport— someone had obviously run over it—and it was so beautiful, just as it was, that I decided to make it into a piece of jewelry!”
I was sold all over again on the Bonnie Jean phenomenon that day, and thus began our precious, invaluable friendship. A good 95% of our time together was conducted by snail mail, simply because Bonnie Jean was seriously hard of hearing, making telephone conversations all but impossible.
Another unforgettable Bonnie Jean moment occurred when, after an AAGNE meeting, I joined a group of artists who were listening intently to a story she was sharing about a particular visit to New York City—a day of merriment with a college friend who lived there. Bonnie Jean was already into her 90s by then, so her fellow artists, most of them much younger than her, loved hearing her stories and absorbing her hard-earned wisdom.
“I met my friend in the heart of Manhattan,” she said, “and when I asked her what we could do first off, she said, ‘Well! We could go upstairs in this place. There’s a party goin’ on up there, and I think it would be fun to check it out!’ ”
When the two of them made their way upstairs and walked through the door, they were greeted by a throng of noisy celebrants—most of them artists—laughing and hobnobbing, munching and drinking—in a room pulsing with raw, creative energy.
And at the very center of the room, to their delight, was none other than the renowned artist Salvador Dali, ensconced on a makeshift throne and surrounded by a veritable harem of topless women, frolicking around him in what must surely have been a moment of unbridled Joie de vivre.
Deb Rider, one of Bonnie Jean’s four daughters, knew how much I loved Bonnie Jean and her art. For many years, she took wonderful care of her mother, housing her in an apartment intimately attached to her home; helping her establish two home-based artist studios, one inside, the other outside and free-standing; and making sure she regularly got to a wide array of visual arts meccas including the Peabody-Essex Museum, the Clark Institute, and MASS-MoCA. She also made sure her mother could be an active participant in Life Drawing sessions, both in and beyond the town of Newburyport—sessions that gave her enormous pleasure and kept her actively involved in the New England arts community.
A few years ago, Bonnie gave me not one but two of her sketchbooks—books I will, of course, always treasure—done when she was in her early 90s. Here, for your appreciation, are just three of the hundreds of skillfully rendered sketches in those books..
Deb also got her mother down, every year, to Maudslay State Park in Newburyport, home of the Newburyport Art Association’s annual Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit. She’d help her set up her sculpture, then stay with her as people stopped and talked with her mother, always enthusiastically, about her work as an artist and her contribution to the exhibit.
Bonnie worked in several media, most notably ceramic sculpture and sculptures that often doubled as found object assemblages. Here (see below, on the right) is one of the two ceramic abstracts of hers that I'm blessed to own.
But what is perhaps the most treasured of the artworks done by her that I own is this magnificent semi-abstract image--a seated nude--done when she was 94 (see at bottom, on the right). It hangs proudly in my home studio now, serving as a reminder of Bonnie Jean Malcolm’s great gifts as an artist, her quiet but constant generosity, and her proven, repeated power to inspire and encourage me in my own work as an artist, writer, and musician.
And then there are the letters: dozens and dozens of hand-written letters, written on everything from sophisticated commercial stationery that I would periodically send to her—it wasn’t easy for her to go shopping for art supplies as she become more and more housebound—to the backs of recycled greeting cards or snippets of discarded newspapers.
Her penmanship in those letters varied in quality and readability—just like my own—but they never, ever failed to reveal the remarkable depth and breadth of her knowledge of the visual arts—that and all of the critical social issues spanning her 100 productive, rewarding years of earthly existence. She was, like me, a proud political progressive and an avid reader, but she never allowed her concern for the major issues to get in the way of her passion for the arts.
Early in our correspondence—most likely within the very first letter she ever wrote to me—was the following poignant, characteristically blunt observation: “My God—you’re young enough to be my son! But it has to be that way now if I’m to have friends, because most of the friends my age are gone now.”
How fortunate it was for me to have become one of her younger, enthusiastic, unswervingly devoted friends. Bonnie Jean Malcolm enriched my life at every turn! Finding a letter from her in my mailbox—sometimes, to my astonishment, as many as three a week—was one of my greatest pleasures. And now, oh, how I do miss those letters—and more importantly, the gifted artist, loyal friend, and constant inspiration who wrote them to me!
— Ross Alan Bachelder, www.artsaplenty.ME Berwick, Maine, January 30, 2023
PS: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention here that Bonnie Jean loved her granddaughter Marina—also an artist—who lives in France but always found the time to come to America and spend time with her grandmother. They would talk and talk, go places together, and immerse themselves in shared creative projects. It was a great pleasure for me to see the two of them at Bonnie’s Retrospective not long ago, enjoying each other’s company while paying homage to Bonnie’s impressive, well-presented wealth of creative work.