Bon Dog

Watercolour Dogs by a British Artist Who Refuses to Paint Humans.

Right. So. Bon Dog is the work of Bon Allen — a self-taught British watercolourist who, by her own admission, genuinely grew up without a television (which, as she gamely points out, makes her rather useful to know in a power cut). She has had work shown at the Saatchi Gallery, served as Suffolk Mind's Artist in Residence in 2018, and then put down the brushes for several decades in order, by her own description, to be a grown-up — before being rather forcefully dragged back to them in early 2024 by Wilson, her Chow Chow and self-described heart dog, while she was nursing him through end-of-life care for chronic kidney disease. Wilson died that April, aged just three and a half, and the entire enterprise of Bon Dog is in some real sense built on top of his absence: every dog she now paints, she says, lets her redirect a bit of the love she still has for him and can no longer give him directly. She refuses, as a matter of principle, to paint humans, on the grounds that they take offence rather too easily, and it is — one has to admit — very difficult to argue with this.

The mechanics of the thing are properly charming. Every Bon Dog design begins as an original watercolour painting — soft, characterful, considerably more wonky and alive than the usual photoreal dog-portraiture genre — and is then printed across a steadily expanding catalogue of homeware, clothing, and accessories, organised by breed and accompanied by Bon's own collection descriptions, which are something of a stylistic event in their own right (the dachshunds billed as small legs and maximum chaos, the Newfoundlands as couch-sized rescue bears, the pugs as wrinkly overlords, the chow chows as adorably aloof, and so on). The current breed roster runs from Basset Hound through Beagle, Bearded Collie, Bernese Mountain Dog, Bracco Italiano, Bulldog, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Chow Chow, Dachshund, Golden Retriever, Labrador, Newfoundland, Pug, Samoyed, Shiba Inu and Whippet — and if one's own particular hound does not appear on the list, one simply commissions Bon to paint it from a photograph (from £60), after which one can have one's dog placed on essentially anything: mugs, treat jars, bowls, stickers, t-shirts, hoodies, pens, and a properly lovely range of hand-painted high-top trainers. Everything is made to order, the clothing is ethically and sustainably sourced with a traceable supply chain, and the whole operation is currently presided over by Noa — a blind rescue Chow Chow — and Bob, about whom less is publicly disclosed but who appears, on the available evidence, to be doing fine.

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