Debbie Bonello Takes Her Easel Outside for New Exhibition at The Phoenicia
The Maltese painter’s fourth solo show, OUTDOORS, opens tomorrow in the hotel’s Palm Court Lounge, and every painting in it was made in the open air.
Forget the quiet studio and the carefully arranged still life. For her latest body of work, Debbie Bonello packed up her paints and headed out into the elements, setting up in front of Maltese and Sicilian landscapes and painting them on the spot, whatever the weather had in store.
The result is OUTDOORS, a new exhibition opening tomorrow at The Phoenicia Malta. It’s Bonello’s fourth solo show, and it brings together works painted entirely on location over the past two years.
“This exhibition is a chapter in my body of work dedicated to the outdoors, where I shift my studio outside,” Bonello told Oh My Malta exclusively. “It’s thrilling, and I’m in my happy place when I paint, especially outside in natural light.”
That thrill comes with a challenge. Painting outdoors means racing the sun as it moves across the sky, with shadows, colours and clouds changing by the minute. There’s no reference photo to fall back on later, so Bonello works quickly and instinctively, capturing a scene in loose, energetic strokes before it slips away.
Anyone who has spent a summer here will recognise the conditions she was working in. There’s the blinding glare of an August afternoon, and the hazy, heavy air that rolls in with the sirocco. Rather than fighting these, Bonello lets them shape each canvas, so the weather ends up setting the colours and mood as much as the view itself.
The paintings sit somewhere between the recognisable and the abstract. You might spot a familiar bit of coastline, a group of trees or the outline of a far-off building, but Bonello leaves plenty unsaid, letting viewers fill in the rest from their own memories of these places.
Sicily, where the artist spends a good part of each summer, features alongside Malta, and seeing the two side by side highlights how closely linked the neighbouring islands are, sharing the same sea, light and sudden shifts in weather.
Fans of Bonello’s previous solo exhibition, Crowded, will notice one big change: the people are gone. Where that show was full of figures, OUTDOORS turns the spotlight on the settings themselves. Traces of human life still appear in paths, buildings and farmed land, but with nobody in the frame, it’s the viewer who gets to step into the scene.
OUTDOORS is curated by Charlene Vella and runs throughout October in the Palm Court Lounge at The Phoenicia Malta.
