STUDIO FOCUS | BERNIE D'ONOFRIO
Living in the Moment…
Until he retired from teaching 3 years ago, Bernie D’Onofrio had worked nearly every day of his life, both as a part-time instructor and glass studio manager at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), and as an artist pursuing his own creative vision. He never considered it work and felt lucky to have his passion be his profession. That passion only grew stronger as the years progressed, and D’Onofrio was nourished by the people he worked with and the students he taught. The good fortune of loving what you do is not without its pressures, however; his quiet fear that it would all come to end pushed him to work harder and harder, and his personal ambitions meant hectic weeks in non-stop motion. He remembers the first day after he stopped teaching being as awkward as the first day of junior high school, filled with uneasiness and insecurity.
The Artist in Glass: Revealing the Soul in Sand
A video made by D’Onofrio’s students at MassArt.
D’Onofrio’s career as a professional artist was there like a trusted friend, giving him continued purpose. He has a coldshop and studio at his home in Millis, MA and regularly took the hour-long drive back to MassArt in Boston to work in their hotshop. When the pandemic hit, and MassArt decided to close the campus to everyone except fulltime students, D’Onofrio’s creative outlet—in a moment he likens to “cutting off his hands”—was suddenly and completely gone. The loss of his studio hit hard, as it was for as long as he can remember a place of great inspiration, personal challenge, and fulfilling relationships.
Despite his ambition and work ethic, or maybe because of it, D’Onofrio has spent many years cultivating his definition of success. He has come to understand that for him success means doing as much as he possibly can each day and not regretting what could not get done; it means living in the moment and not worrying too much about tomorrow. This outlook on life offered D’Onofrio a considerable pandemic silver lining—the opportunity and energy for meaningful engagement with his close friends and family, particularly with his wife, Brenda, with whom he could finally do the simple things that in 40 years together their busy lives had rarely allowed.
Brenda and Bernie D’Onofrio
Visiting with mom!
The pair met in grad school and Brenda has also spent her life in creative pursuits, running art programs at the women’s prison in Framingham and a now-closed mental health hospital in Medfield. For the past 18 months, they hunkered down in their outpost in remote and rural Millis (a town with about 7,000 residents) and enjoyed life’s basic pleasures—fresh air every day, taking walks even in the harshest winter weather, going to the store, sitting in the park. He realized he was just fine if the biggest decision he made in a day was what size coffee to order. He celebrated his 70th birthday and visited with his mother in Medford, MA, who just turned 96 and still lives in the house he grew up in. He was able to consider his life outside the single dimension of glass.
With Brenda on the Slough Creek View Hiking Trail, Yellowstone National Park
Bernie and Brenda still have some things they want to do before he dives back into his work, such as a trip to Montana, where the two love to backpack and go fly fishing. But the siren song of glass will eventually call D’Onofrio back into the studio. Right now, he keeps track of his creative noodling with doodles and sketches that are less precursors to specific work than they are avenues for figuring things out. D’Onofrio’s approach to his work is in fact quite methodical and scientific as he experiments with different forms and colors in a practice of problem-solving that over the course of many years has led to an intuitive relationship with the medium. Each piece leads him to something else, and D’Onofrio gets a lot of satisfaction and inspiration out of the fluid trajectory from one work to the next.
D’Onofrio’s father was a painter and technical illustrator, but he resisted being taught by dad and was more drawn to tactile glass than paint and canvas. He is fascinated by the alchemy of glass as a simple mixture of raw materials thrown into a 2000-degree furnace, and by the immediacy of glass as it is manipulated it into a voluminous object of color, space, texture, line, and light not bound by the restrictions of a two-dimensional plane. Later in life, he came to understand the powerful influence of his father’s tutelage when he appropriated the still life format in his desert series installations of opaque anthropomorphic vessels.
D’Onofrio’s work is a balance between commitment to craftsmanship and a call to contribute something of his humanity to the world around him. He puts forward his spirit, his beliefs, and his outlook on the world in his artwork, and over the course of his career his aesthetic has pivoted dramatically to reflect changing circumstances. About ten years ago, he had a strong reaction to the proliferation of the digital in our lives, lamenting how our device dependency fundamentally affected our interactions with others and contributed to a loss of personal connection. His work became less narrative and more representative of an inner landscape seeking expression, which he visualized in a completely different way than his previous work. Whereas his desert landscapes were opaque, these new pieces optimized the transparency and optics of glass to allow the viewer to search the pieces and discover the world within.
While he has not closed the book on this chapter of introversion, he also knows that the pandemic will stir yet another rebirth in the direction of his work. D’Onofrio is not one to hold on to negative waves, and rather looks forward to capturing what he anticipates will be humanity’s heightened exuberance in a post-pandemic world. He envisions a course correction where our engagement with one another will become more human, and he is compelled to incorporate that into work that will make people happy. If success for D’Onofrio is living in the moment and expressing that moment in his work, it is also in knowing that the objects he makes have a life beyond his own hand, that eventually they will be absorbed and appreciated by those around him who share precious space in this extraordinary world.