Living Her Dream
Bonneau learning her business can be her art
By Leon Thompson, Special to the Messenger
FAIRFAX -- Janet Bonneau is the small-town Vermont girl that wanted to be a working artist when she grew up - and did.
"I'm living my dream," Bonneau, 57, of Fairfax, said recently, while seated in the Foothills Bakery in the center of town.
Bonneau - a youthful wife and mother of four grown daughters, and a grandmother of one - has always found her center when she's painting, and she has always taken painting seriously. Every day, she practices her techniques, just as a musician rehearses.
"The big piece is like the performance for me," she said. "Painting is when I'm most who I am. It's when I'm calmest, in my zone."
However, Bonneau only started selling and marketing her work three years ago, after she started a photography business. Adopting a hustler's mentality to push her photos made her realize she could also sell her paintings, and it made her paint more. She realized she wanted the feedback.
Recently, Bonneau has taken to plein air painting, meaning she paints landscapes outside.
"I love it," she said, noting that plein air painting has its selling points. While at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe last month, she was painting a landscape when a couple from New York stopped, watched and bought the piece before completion.
"Painting outside is working," she said.
For the past year, Bonneau has been painting full-time - her dream since she started drawing and sketching scenes around her Cold Hollow farm in Sheldon, at age 4.
Bonneau, the daughter of Andrew and Claire Bonneau, said she was the artsy baby of her siblings: a sister in Stowe and a brother who died of cancer within the last year.
While a student at Enosburg Falls High School, Bonneau painted dark, moody oil paintings and practiced her portraits by painting album covers from Jim Hendrix, Neil Young and James Taylor; Instead of immersing herself in extracurricular activities, she spent much of her free time with paintbrushes and canvases.
"I wasn't a big joiner," she said.
After high school, Bonneau left the Cold Hollow comforts for Baltimore, Md., where she spent two years at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
"I went from green pastures and beautiful views .... to concrete bridges and sulfuric city lights," Bonneau said. "I got homesick, but I stayed for two years because I wanted to be a better painter."
Bonneau then returned to Vermont and started painting scenes of Cold Hollow again, but she remained in her dark-and-moody phase. Then, for 20 years, she was a stay-at-home mom, and while she drew and painted, she hit the pause button on her art career.
"I love my daughters, and they know that, and loved raising them, and they know that, too," she said. "But now that my kids are grown, it's time for me to push forward. I'm determined to live my art dream, once and for all.
"I don't think it's sunk in," she added. "Selling my work is a wonderful side effect to something I would be doing anyway."