The long gnarled fingers reach with urgent stillness. Growing side by side for centuries, always just out of reach of one another, live oaks and cypresses stretch, longing to intertwine the brittle tips of branches before they grow too old and topple. Or so it seems in the fairy tale light of Melissa Bonin’s latest series of works, Dances on Water.
The New Iberia painter has been enthralled by the reflections of sky on water along Bayou Teche, painting the tree-lined waterway the way Monet painted Rouen Cathedral, over and over in every permutation of the changing light. Red dawns, golden afternoons, evenings falling blue. The bayou sometimes floats beneath a blanket of fog, or wavers as if seen through a window sheeted with rain, Spanish moss dripping silently without stirring the water’s surface.
Bonin’s painting technique is a la prima. She approaches her blank canvas without any preliminary drawings and begins to move layers of oil paint. Wet on wet, the colors assemble themselves into flowing water, sky, and tree lined river bank all at one time. When she draws, hanging moss and dangling vine spin themselves into calligraphy.
Clearly, the trees talk to Bonin. And with her brush, she answers them. Dances on Water opens Saturday, Nov. 8, from 6-8 p.m. in the Side Gallery at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in conjunction with the November ArtWalk. On Nov. 18, beginning at 6 p.m., Melissa Bonin will be joined by poets Darrell Bourque and Sidney Creaghan for a gallery talk and poetry reading. For more information, call the ACA at 233-7060.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
Philip deMahy Sr., a once respected New Iberia ad exec, was sentenced May 2 to spend the next two years (he faced up to 100 years) in a state penitentiary after state and federal investigators found dozens of images depicting children engaged in lewd sexual acts on his personal computer.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
The long gnarled fingers reach with urgent stillness. Growing side by side for centuries, always just out of reach of one another, live oaks and cypresses stretch, longing to intertwine the brittle tips of branches before they grow too old and topple. Or so it seems in the fairy tale light of Melissa Bonin’s latest series of works, Dances on Water. 
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