Located on a corner lot facing Nat’s Jazz Club on the Detroit City SIM, is Bona’s Visual Jazz in Fine Art. This gallery contains a plethora of work that is a spiritual combination of music and digital art. In reading the notes on the artist, TaO Bona, I learn he was raised by two artists and he says that ‘balance and contrast’ escape him. Contrary to what he tells visitors, his balance and contrast are spectacular and must be intuitive. He also uses well thought out names that reveal his story telling desire with each image.
He favors bright colors and dramatic lines that have a lyrical feeling to view. There is also a love of the earthy feeling brick in some back grounds. He even has a piece titled “Brick Laying BOP” with the brick background and a bluesy male figure superimposed over them. Using the bricks he makes a lovely portrait in “Hard Sax”. The details of the saxophone and vest contrast nicely with the warm dark color of his skin.
It is exciting that he tries different looks with his art. In “Legs Do That” the woman’s legs have the ceramic paint feeling and very textured whereas the body is smooth short strokes of a more painted look. A very different piece is “Still She Dances” where a linen type background holds a female figure composed of notes and musical writings. You can both feel and see the woman in the picture with the stylized image. In ‘Chronos At Rest’ a large swish of cool colors snakes around and behind a bright burst of reds. Though each of these images is very different is style the love of bright colors remains. With his image “How Trumpets Work” he displays a trumpet emitting swirls of colorful lines that feel musical.
His work emits strong feelings in each movement within the images. In ‘Where We Used To Play’ the artist has given the image lighting at such a place as to make the hand in it move defined and memorable. He gives us more subtle feelings in ‘Uprising’ in rolling rich reds that curve around to give us a arched female form in dance. He has another subtle female form in ‘Across the Pale’.
He also shares parental advice in pictorial form with ‘Parental Advice Laugh when the Laugh’ and ‘Parental Advice Sleep when they Sleep’. The ‘Laugh’ image displays a large nautilus and a smaller on “open’ facing a clown fish.
A truly beautiful work of art is his image ‘Detroit Glow’ of a city scape with blues and cool darker greens and purples. with a white street. This pictorial tribute to Detroit is masterful from this Philadelphia artist.
He has not confined his work to 2D. He has a couple sculptures around the gallery; The Grand Sysophis Erection took me by surprise with the small delicate figures pushing up the stone. ‘In the beginning there was a Question’ has two surrealist busts next to each other. And his sculpture ‘Three Kings’ with three figures with very distinct and interesting shapes.
Plan a trip here and then scoot across the street to Nat’s and experience the best of the Detroit City SIM. Artfully Yours, Seersha Heart
Location: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Detroit%20City/99/212/2
Kultivate Arts 
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