For over forty years, Bonnie Lucas has pursued a highly individual artistic path, infused with complex, personal, and meaningful imagery that is often expressed through unusual but skillfully handled materials. Primarily through variations on the technique of collage, the artist has created an evolving world that synthesizes narrative and abstraction in consistently inventive and appealing works.

Among her earliest mature works are small collages made with yarn, thread and miscellaneous small objects. In these pieces, two hallmarks of Lucas' methodology already come to the fore: a dedication to careful craftsmanship, and her true affection for the notions, cheap jewelry fragments, toys, and other oddments she scatters throughout much of her work. As she started to incorporate. areas of fabrics and bits of clothing, including children's clothing but especially women's undergarments and lingerie, these materials offered a suggestion of femininity, a concept that Lucas unabashedly embraced, but would later subvert in surprising and powerful ways. Princess of Power, 1988

Lucas' largest work, Princess of Power, 1989, is a mind-boggling mix of interpenetrating fabrics and objects, including a full wedding dress, whole skeins of yarn and thread, toys, scatterings of beads and sewing notions, and even a pink telephone cord. Toward the bottom of Princess of Power is a small but important image - a plastic figure of a bride. In the 1980s, Lucas' art took a sharp turn toward narrative, dealing primarily with the more personal side of what are categorized as "women's issues," ranging from courtship and marriage, the societal roles and expectations of women and men, and women's sexuality. In these works, one of Lucas' primary tools is the deployment of opposites: pleasure and pain, sexual innocence and carnal knowledge, and the paradoxical depiction of disturbing subjects in the pleasant colors and placid trappings of illustrations for children's books.

Thus, in Lucky Lady, a female bride has gotten her groom, but he is a puny figure seemingly compressed by the huge bride's constrictor-like grip on his torso. The bride herself is a bizarre chimera, with limbs. replaced by knitting needles and plastic forks and knives, designating a decidedly pointed and potentially dangerous end to this episode. Many of Lucas' works refer to childhood through the presence of figurines of boys and girls, and toys or children's clothing, as well as imagery of children taken from books and other printed matter, or in images painted by Lucas herself. In the latter category, Lucas replicates in gouache or watercolor the sweetly deadpan manner of pictures found in traditional children's books, but depicts the boys and girls in semi- surreal situations implying sexuality and pre-adolescent confusion. Such works are rife with symbolism, such as budding or germinating flowers and cells, spiky red-tipped plant shoots, and even selectively reddened bodily areas of the children themselves. The ancillary imagery taken from children's books is respected for its authenticity of spirit and literalness, thus realizing its potential for upending expectations when shown out of context.

While Lucas' major medium has been object-collage, she has devoted varying periods to painting and drawing, in which she is also quite proficient. In her oil or acrylic paintings, her technique bears physical reminders of her collage work, in that the paint is applied thickly, often in a stroke-by-stroke method of marking that suggests a laminar or shingling effect. Indeed, a few paintings from the mid-1970s are actually collages of strips and bits of acrylic paint applied to canvas in a collage method. The surfaces may also be quite irregular, revealing a multitude of built-up layers. Her most recent series of paintings leaves any darkness of mood or subject behind to luxuriate in Lucky Lady, 1985 a glowing world of natural innocence, with bright, cheerful and vibrant hues and simple, child-like motifs.

Over the decades, Lucas has elaborated an oeuvre with fluid transitions in narrative emphasis and format easily moving back and forth between imagery and abstraction, innocence and wisdom, joy and fear, infancy and maturity.