Artist Feature: Christopher Bonelli
Christopher Bonelli and his favorite hunting buddy, Luna, a retail hawk.
Chris Bonelli has been on island since the ‘90s. A talented artist and outdoorsman, he’s got more than a few feathers in his cap. Whether it’s fly fishing for stripers on the south shore, snagging rabbits with his hawk in the moors, or selling his Gyotaku fish prints down at the Sustainable Nantucket Artisans Market, you might have seen him around.
Looking at him, you probably wouldn’t guess he came into this world by way of the Bronx. Bonelli’s parents met in NYC at art school, and he spent the first few years of his life there. He was first introduced to an eclectic world of artists through his father, who was an illustrator for an advertising agency in NYC, “pretty similar to what you would see in the show Mad Men,” he claims. His father worked with photographers, graphic designers, colorists, movie poster creators, and all sorts of painters. “Take your kid to work day was a crazy scene,” he says, “but it was definitely exciting.”
The face you make when a solid striped bass is taking you into the backing of your fly line.
Photo by Dan LeMaitre
Eventually his parents wanted a more rural setting for their children, so they moved them out of the city to Croton Falls. “Here we are, all these city kids in the countryside,” Bonelli remembered. “All of a sudden I was in the woods. We were outside all the time.” Bonelli soon found river life among the trees to be much more fun than living in the city. He spent as much time as he could on the river, fishing often with his grandfather for anything they could catch. On garbage day, Bonelli and his buddies would run around town and collect anything they thought might float well, dragging mattresses and trash can lids across town to ride them back down the river.
Chris Bonelli, in the moors with a freshly harvested whitetail buck. The pursuit of whitetail deer is one of many outdoor obsessions for Bonelli.
The summer after his sophomore year in high school, Bonelli signed up for a month long canoe trip with the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School. The trip promised a month long journey of paddling and camping along the lakes and rivers of Northern Maine. “It was a long way from Croton Falls, and the drive was out of question for my folks, but my mother did find a way for me to get there…” Bonelli’s older brother had a friend from high school who very recently acquired his pilots license, and was working on logging a few more sky miles. Bonelli’s mother convinced him to fly her son up there in his small, single engine, four seater rental plane. “There was no real airport in the town of Greenville, just a large strip of beat up grass. It was the first landing of its kind that my brothers friend had to make,” he laughed. That month further solidified Bonelli’s call for the wild, and twice he was asked by the organization to return. He spent the next two consecutive summers among the wilds of Maine and the coast of Maryland, working logistics and as a counselor for Outward Bound.
Bonelli’s love for the outdoors and the simplicity of a laid-back rural lifestyle followed him up through college. After earning an associates degree in environmental science and forestry from SUNY Morrisville, he headed off to Potsdam, a college about as far upstate as you can go. Originally, he shipped up there for an ice hockey program, but stayed for a concentration in printmaking. Looking back, it was a fortuitous decision, and one that would change the course of his life.
“I had to choose something for a major at the time,” he said, “and now it’s funny to me that I chose printmaking. I never would have imagined then that I’d still be doing it today. Painting, sculpture, photography… I was all over the place. I was just drawn to the arts.”
A gyotaku painting of a tuna tail, by Bonelli.
One summer afternoon, a few slightly older friends from Potsdam were having an alumni weekend on Nantucket. “It was back in ’95 or so,” he said. “They all rented a house out in Tom Nevers. Man, it was so foreign to me… scrub oak as far as the eye could see. All that salty air. There was no-one out here.”
In true college fashion, his buddies immediately gave him the Nantucket initiation a la Captain Tobey’s and the Chicken Box. “What little money I had back then in college… it went fast that weekend. All gone,” he laughed.
Fresh out of cash, his good friend Blake Richards (now Nantucket’s local framer and owner of Nantucket Frameworks) recommended he go down to a little corner store on Main St., the Hub, and post a note on the personals board. Bonelli drew a picture of a guy holding some tools and wrote down the phone number of the rental house. “I hadn’t even made it back out to the house and I had already lined up a brick laying job on Orange St.,” he laughed. “My buddy and I called back, and said we’d done plenty of brickwork, even though we hadn’t… It came out pretty good, though, and the guy paid us cash.”
Bonelli had a blast lining up odd jobs to sustain living the island life. He and his friends were living the dream. They spent their time pulling up lobster pots, having beach fires and clam bakes, and fishing all over the island. “Man, I fell in love with the place. It was the real Nantucket,” he said. “I had to go back and finish up school but I turned around and came back the first chance I got that same summer.”
Bonelli made the decision to live on Nantucket full time, and over the next few years of his early twenties, he took on a few different jobs to afford it. He worked at the airport, was a prep cook at Sconset Market, a door guy at the Chicken Box, and bar backed at the White Dog Cafe, which is now the Gaslight. In between all of that, he was painting houses. “Any way I could fit it in,” he remembered, “I was doing just that.”
Eventually, after all the summer staff up and left unannounced one fall, Bonelli became the full time manager of the White Dog Cafe. He was living upstairs, tending to the outdoor patio patrons, and serving wine and beer inside. One night, an old friend from high school appeared across the bar. His friend, who he hadn’t seen in years, said he was on island to see a new gal he was dating, who happened to be a big-time decorative painter. Bonelli mentioned he’d like to chat with her, and next thing he knew he found himself painting murals for her company. He liked the idea of the money he could make painting murals as it was more of a creative, artistic outlet vs. the monotonous house painting he had been doing on the side. “I did a lot of murals, a lot of decorative projects,” he said. “Murals were big back then in the ‘90s.”
Bonelli’s new boss also had a vacant houseboat in the harbor, and he was quickly offered the opportunity to live on it. He immediately loved it. “Being right on the water was an experience,” he explained. “My view changed every time the wind blew. It was on a mooring so one day I’d be looking at Brant Point lighthouse, and the next I’d be looking at Monomoy.” He found himself newly inspired, born again by living on the water and making supplemental income through his painting. He was also of course getting heavily back into fly fishing.
Bonelli knew he was about to spend a long time on island, and subsequently started looking for more off-season outlets as the summer turned to fall. “I was knockin’ down Tom Mulholland’s door in Sconset, looking to become a falconer,” Bonelli recalled. “I was trying to get him to sponsor me as an apprentice, and eventually he agreed.”
Soon Bonelli was learning the ins and outs of falconry, and eventually had his own license to hunt wild game with hawks he trapped on island. He found that he enjoyed the off-season the most. “That’s when Nantucket came alive for me,” he said. “Being able to relax and enjoy the island, not having to bust your ass so much… the island shut down, and that’s what really had me hooked. Man, It was like a breath of fresh air.”
One summer afternoon, Bonelli and Mulholland agreed to go out on a hawking expedition of sorts, and Mulholland’s friend, Peter Cull, was in tow. They went hawk trapping along the east end, catching migrating passage raptors as they passed over the island from points north. It was through Cull, a commercial fisherman and independent artist visiting from Florida, that Bonelli was first introduced to fish printing. Also known as Gyotaku, it’s a traditional Japanese method of printing fish that dates back to the mid-1800s. “I believe Pete first showed me his fish prints out of the back of his van. He had a rack of shirts and woodcarvings he traveled with,” he remembered. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever. He’d go out, catch fish, cover them in paint and print them on t-shirts.”
Bonelli was inspired by the newfound art form, and also knew there was an untapped market for it on island. “No one was doing it out here,” he stated. “It existed in a few small coastal communities, but not on Nantucket.”
A blue and bass. Fish prints by Bonelli. The detail in them is striking when viewed in real life, as they are often the actual size of the fish.
Later that week, Bonelli caught a few sizable fish off of his house boat and decided to make a few fish prints of his own. Initially, he didn’t intend to do anything with them except give them to his friends and family. He dabbled with the art form here and there, but it wasn’t until one Memorial Day Weekend that it really clicked for him.
“I woke up one day just before the holiday weekend and thought a red white and blue bass print might be cool,” he recalled. “I had a big bass in the freezer of the houseboat, so I pulled it out and made a fish print. Blake (Richards) put it in a quick frame and I brought it downtown to the artist’s association gallery. They threw it in the window and I think I was a few miles down the road before they called me to say it had sold.” He knew there was potential for selling fish prints and he kept it in the back of his mind to make more.
Bonelli and his partner, Melissa Dudley, set up down at the Sustainable Nantucket Farmers and Artisans Market.
Like father, like son. Bonelli and Phoenix.
At this point, the mural industry was showing signs of slowing down, and Bonelli had a son on the way. He had also just ended a job working for the Trustees of Reservations out on Coskata-Coatue wildlife refuge, and he knew he had to do something else. He jumped headfirst in to Gyotaku and started looking for different avenues to sell his work. Bonelli and his partner, Melissa Dudley, a local jeweler, successfully applied to the then newly-formed Sustainable Nantucket Farmers and Artisans Market. “We had a crude set up at our first few markets. Everything was just kind of thrown together, but we went for it and we actually ended up selling out of everything we brought,” he recalls. They recognized the opportunity in front of them and began to step it up. They’d sell what they could and invest the income back into their market setup. It paid off in spades. Now, they both have studios in their home and they’re both still doing it. “As hard as it can be… at least it’s refreshing and enjoyable,” he said with a smile.
Bonelli has carved out a living selling his fish prints on island and today it remains his main gig. He is an independent artist, doing what he loves. He is grateful for how things have unfolded for him and his family, and after looking back on it all, he left me with a specific Bruce Lee quote that resonates with him — “Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
Bonelli believes Nantucket is like that. “When you’re dropped off here, you become Nantucket,” he said. “You are all of a sudden a part of this island, and if you’re here long enough, and you don’t fight it, that culture, be it the surf scene, art scene, fishing scene, whatever … it can become part of you.”
To view or purchase Bonelli’s latest work, catch up with him on Instagram: @nantucketfishmonger
