Playing with fire

Her subject is nature; however, her materials are often industrial. At one point in her varied career, she patinated copper sheets, bent them into shapes attached to welded rebar. That led her to metal mesh backed with watercolors, then into metal mesh screens allowing light to show through.

Texture, color and light imbue all her artwork.

One current series of mesh panels are torched, then painted over with pigments, returning gently to a more traditional appearance.

Where Ruth Asawa sculpted similar materials into abstract forms, Wonne is duplicating nature in representational pieces. She’s literally bending the material to her own purposes.

If all that sounds hard and technical, the result is scintillating and almost ethereal.

She is actually sculpting natural forms — leaves, flowers, trees — and insists that her inspiration is not famous artists, but nature itself.

“Dahlias” is a large stainless steel mesh panel with flowers outlined as a result of the heating process, then overpainted in a rainbow of acrylic colors. The mesh background shimmers in light as you move around it, pushing the floral shapes into focus.

Yet this is just a small part of her repertoire. She also paints on canvas more traditionally in acrylics.

“Cherry Blossoms” is as different from the mesh works as can be. A painting of flowering trees in an orchard almost exploding in petals, reminiscent of a particular Van Gogh. He derived that composition from studying and copying Asian prints. In Wonne’s portfolio I see a similar progression, from Asian forms to Western interpretations.

“The colors are everywhere, the flower petals float around me. I see the splendid symphony of the lights,” she said.

“Floating Petals” is a deep blue floral painting with mesmerizing depth, similar to the way Monet’s Water Lilies had no horizon line, just planes of focus leading to infinity. Though a flat surface, it is cinematic in the way the eye and mind are drawn to move through. You can get lost in it.

“Floating Petals II” is another interpretation with a more classical floral foreground, yet that same depth of background draws you in deeply. Monet would be immensely proud.

The show title “Suspended in Light” is a good description, but the word “immersive” fits even better. So-called immersive art shows project and move lights all around you; they move, you watch. Wonne’s works stand still, but induce you to move your eye and your thoughts around and into them.

For Wonne, her art and her life are inextricably interwoven.

Her life story reads like a novel. Born to an educated Korean family and achieving a Ph.D., she decided being a professor like her father was “boring.” She detoured into art and traveled: France and Western Europe, Morocco, eventually settling in the United States. Her art journey similarly is a captivating tale of inspiration moving from one medium to another, then the next.  

“If I did only one thing I’d be bored,” she said.

“I don’t do landscapes, I do freedom,” she said. Her eyes twinkle, her voice sparkles as her face folds into a deep smile.

This gentle, vibrant woman definitely asserts herself.

“I’m a free artist,” she said, “I can work forever.”

See her show and marvel at how the range of her methods leads inexorably to visually stunning artwork.

Artist reception March 27 from 5-7 p.m.

You Can Create Too: Fire but not like Wonne’s, Half Moon Bay Art Glass is open for visiting weekends and offers group and individual lessons: hmbartglass.com.

Studio Shop Gallery, 244 Primrose Road, Burlingame, (650) 344-1378, studioshopgallery.com.

Bart Charlow, author, artist and consultant blends over 45 years of painting and photography with narrative storytelling. Explore the intersection of observation and expression through his insights on the local art scene, find his books at bartcharlow.com and his art at bartsart.weebly.com.