When it comes to art, everybody wants an original. Brian Bonebrake’s paintings, in which everyday subjects—plump fruits, frosty popsicles, dead fish, shiny tricycles, voluptuous nudes—are rendered in epic scale and bright saturated colors, fulfill every definition of the term. They also help support a lifestyle that includes two kids, a wife, two cars, three motorcycles, and a West Loop home and studio. “I’ve been able to sell at least one painting a month without being in a gallery since 1995,” he says proudly. His pieces sell for anywhere from $400 to $15,000.
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The duplex apartment where the couple live with their two toddlers, Rebecca and Grace, is above the proverbial shop, Bonebrake’s studio and self-run gallery the Red Trike Art Company. It was once home to a wholesale butcher, who also lived above the shop, and since buying the building in 2006 Bonebrake has kept the selling space much the same. A small antechamber serves as the gallery, with its grungy, hulking steel refrigerator doors intact. But their industrial edge is tempered by the vibrant, often capricious paintings that surround them. The cavernous meat locker, no longer icy cold, now houses the studio as well as some of the family vehicles.
All the walls, save those that are exposed brick, are swathed with graphic designs in wild hues. “I don’t color in the lines, and I don’t follow any rules,” Bonebrake proclaims, then quickly makes an amendment: “I do use a drop cloth.” When a new material inspires him, he experiments with it here. This explains the patchwork of bright construction paper that sheathes a wall and part of the ceiling in his daughters’ room, adjacent to another wall of squiggly stripes in myriad hues. “They like the stuff so much I just papered the wall with it.” he says. “When they get bored, I’ll toss up something else.”
In fact, everything needs a little work, as far as he’s concerned: “I’m about to put doors over the kitchen shelves to turn them into cabinets, work on our bedroom and maybe replace the spiral staircase with something more fun, and be done by Christmas.” But he plans on starting all over again in January. “There’s nothing more satisfying than finishing a house,” he says. “You might as well keep finishing it over and over again.”v
