Gene Bonini 

Gene Bonini was born in 1948 and raised in Inverness, California. His father was from Switzerland and his mother was Italian. Self-taught, he started to draw in the late 1950s. His inspiration began with the cover subjects and featured artists in Time magazine which he began drawing in 1964. He would then send the finished drawing to the person who he had drawn and ask them to autograph the drawing and send it back.

In the mid. 1970s he began drawing from other national and international publications. By the early 1980s he was drawing several portraits a week and by then he had received hundreds of autographed portraits.

All of the portraits he has drawn are of well-known figures, the most noteworthy ones being: Fidel Castro, David Ben-Gurion, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Shah of Iran, Ella Fitzgerald, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Marlene Dietrich,Cary Grant, Robert De Niro, Mel Tormé, Joe Williams, Erté, Lee Mullican and Roy Lichtenstein.

Bonini’s love of nature led him to work as the “keeper of the woods” at the painter Gordon Onslow Ford’s Bishop Pine Preserve for almost forty years and he is currently working for the Lucid Art Foundation.

His portfolio contains over four thousand signed portraits. He lives in Inverness and continues drawing five portraits every week.