Week #29, Coming Home III

Archie Bongé, National Sketchbook: Fishing Boats, c. 1936, ink on paper

Dusti Bongé, United States Fidelity & Guarantee Company Yearbook: Fishing Boats, c. 1936, pencil on paper

Our current exhibit Coming Home: Becoming an Artist, tells the story of how Dusti Bongé started her artistic career when she and her husband Archie settled in Biloxi in the early 1930s. Dusti started to join Arch in the studio and on his excursions through town. Some of Archie’s last works and Dusti's earliest works offer great examples of these joint artistic endeavors. And this week we present a spectacular one.

One of the most important aspects of becoming/being an artist is to sketch, sketch, and then sketch some more. And thus, Archie and Dusti would bring sketchbooks with them when visiting the harbor and similar haunts in town. Here we have side by side sketchbooks from that time.

Dusti would readily use any old sketchbook or notebook available. In this case it was a complimentary “yearbook” from the United States Fidelity & Guarantee Company. This particular yearbook was from 1924, so it had been languishing, pages empty, for about a decade. Why not put that paper to good use.

These two sketches show Archie’s and Dusti’s respective approaches to capturing the same scene. Both drawings show a sailboat casually beached on the shore, sails down, as if taking a break from its hard day’s work. The first is a study by Archie, in ink, the second is one by Dusti, in pencil.

Viewing them together one can see that Archie and Dusti sketched from virtually the same vantage point. Both use quick, confident marks to give shape to the boat and its masts, and to hint at the distant shore on the horizon. A few details present in Archie’s depiction are omitted in Dusti’s. This is probably because Dusti was training herself to capture the mood of the scene with quick gestures more so than all the particulars. Archie, given his academic training, was more accurately articulating the full scope of the scene. Incidentally, Dusti did two sketches of this scene.

It is quite remarkable to think that Dusti had only just started pursuing art.