Danielle Bonnet
Last year around August i got an Email from Danielle she said that she was interested in learning neon glass bending, so i answered saying that i would gladly teach her, so we set a meeting time and she came over to discuss the details ($$) and she started the following weekend.
I have to say that it’s been a pleasure teaching her, she is a very nice young lady that has her mind and heart set at becoming a neon artist and to my surprise, she is getting there at the speed of light, (Neon light).
She comes on the weekends and practices on the fires for 5 hours a day, to my surprise a few months ago she made a drawing a design and she told me that she wanted to do it in neon, i liked her enthusiasm she already was starting to show signs of being an artist, she is just using neon as her means to show her art but she already had an artists talent i saw that when she brought her first design.
She still has some practicing to do but i am sure that she will dominate the glass bending in record time.
Then just about a month or so ago she told me that she was going to exhibit her neon at an art gallery in downtown Los Angeles, and i asked her what are you going to exhibit and she said “I don’t know yet” but it has to be a tropical theme, we still have time she said it’s about a month from now, ok i said.
I liked her sense of adventure plus her self-confident attitude never doubting that it can be done.
Then two weeks later she showed me the design for the show plus one more, it was a panther and a banana, the banana was easy but the panther was complicated, and i told her i hope we can finish on time, she said yes we can Juan you’ll see and she was right, the exhibit opened on Thursday and it was the previous Saturday and we were still bending the glass, she still had to install the neon on the plastic back and that alone was a lot of work, my job was to bend and pump the hard parts of the cat and she did the easy ones but she had to install the glass on the plastic and mount the transformers and have the sign ready to just hang and plug, on Tuesday she told me she had everything ready and that she was going to hang it on the wall of the gallery, with the little help of some friends because the whole sign turned out to be heavy, plus it was 6 foot wide by about 30 inches tall, the banana was no big deal because it was a lot smaller.
So the day of her first exhibit as a neon artist arrived, everything was ready and I and my wife took the trip from Murrieta to downtown LA, the place was packed and it was great, Danielle was very happy, she had finally reached one of her lifelong dreams, to become an artist. Congratulations Danielle
Here is a video and some photos of the event
Danielle at the fires