“My family used to own the ranch where the crash happened. It’s called Corona. The ranch house of the guy that found the ‘downed crash’ is still on the property and people would come out and want to dig it out. A rancher named Mac Brazel is the guy that found the alien bodies, supposedly. And then from what I heard, they sent the bodies to Wright Patt! It wasn’t a big deal when I was a kid. ‘The X-Files’ in the 90’s is what popularized it.”
Bogle, 47, a visual artist and tenured art professor of painting and drawing at Sinclair Community College, lives in an 1890 pink Victorian in South Park with her husband, photographer Francis Schanberger, their 8-year-old twins Minerva and Bernard, two fish, and cats Katerina and Bella Laghosty. Her studio is in the laundry room of her house. She has a contagiously rollicking laugh, and her home is full of art and color.
BOHO BACKGROUND
“My mom is the daughter of two bohemian artists, still alive in their late 90s. There’s a good art community in Roswell. There’s a museum called The Anderson who fund a year long artist-in-residence program. My grandma worked for years at the Roswell Museum. My mom and aunt basically grew up at the museum and my grandparents have an amazing collection. My grandpa makes stained glass. My mom and aunt both do ceramics.”
DOWN TO THE STUDS
“Before this neighborhood got popular, we bought this house on auction. We had to get it completely re-sided, all the windows. They pulled the old siding off and it had hand-made nails. I’ve heard from he neighborhood that the man that built this house was a woodworker who also did the original wood for the library downtown.”
GODDESS AND RESCUER
“My daughter’s name is Minerva, like the goddess of strategic warfare, in which she inhabits. Bernard is named after Bernard from the movie ‘The Rescuers’. It’s the two mice and they’re part of the World Mice Organization and they help rescue a kidnapped kid. That was formative for me.” Her laugh bubbles up.
CATCH THAT BUS
“I wake up at 5:19-5:23 a.m., some time in there. Either one or both children will come in our room for a couple awesome snuggle moments. There’s a lot of sibling dynamics. Besties and worsties. We wake up early because our kids ride a Dayton Public bus. It’s a long route and Ms. Tina is here at 6:00. There’s one other neighbor that walks across the park and we’re all just standing there in the dark.”
COFFEE TALK
“They eat breakfast at school, so we take them over to the bus stop and then we come back and do our morning admin and drink a lot of coffee. I’m usually grading and answering emails at the dining room table. My husband teaches too, at Wright State and UD. Sometimes we talk about whatever teaching foibles we need to go over.”
Credit: Hannah Kasper
Credit: Hannah Kasper
BIRTHDAY PARTY EXPRESSIONISM
“I go and do my office hour at 7:00. My colleague Anthony and I drink coffee and talk about our day. My class is from 8:00 to 10:45. We work on shading or perspective, geared towards observational drawing. This week, because it was my birthday, I wanted to do Expressionism. I brought a cheap cake from Kroger, set up streamers, set up a party scene tableau in the center of the room. They did expressive drawings to music where they were intuitively letting the elements of drawing shift depending on the mood they were feeling. I let them pick some of the songs, so there was the 7-minute heavy metal song and these crazy charcoal and pastel drawings of cake. I told them to pin up the ones they felt worked and they could develop one or two.”
COURSELOAD
“I teach three studio classes and an internship class. I also teach the graduation capstone where they have an exhibition. Our classes are stacked to be accessible, with four levels of drawing or painting in the same class. It’s a dynamic mix of people — some are just learning, and others who are polishing their skills.”
PODCAST DIET
“I’m done teaching around noon. I change out our student display cases. I clean up the classroom, pull those drawings out and lay them out. I always listen to a podcast. I’m listening to “You’re Wrong About”. They talk about different historical events with deeper research. It’s nerdily interesting. And ‘Random Horror Podcast No. 9′. I have a weird podcast diet.”
“We have a faculty meeting today. We have a really cool scholarship program through our department based on portfolio. They get to show us a portfolio and we do a short interview. Today we’re decide who gets what.”
SWEET ARROW
“I’ll either head home or run an errand, like the grocery store. Friday is both of our day off. Usually we will go on a walk at Sweet Arrow MetroPark in Bellbrook and actually talk to each other. They have a prairie and a forest. Sometimes we’ll get lunch together and buy a fancy sandwich at Grist or Tony & Pete’s. Both of us will do studio stuff.”
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
MULTITASKING SPACE
“I work in the studio/guest bedroom/laundry room! I’ve been working on colored pencils drawings of scenes from Woodland Cemetery, where the Wright Brothers and other Dayton luminaries are buried. Since the pandemic, I’ve been collecting the old petals that come off the artificial arrangements. The ones that get blown off and lawn mowed. I stitch them together into a web. I keep adding to it so it’s getting bigger.”
MOMENT OF COLLAPSE
“I always like stuff that’s right at the moment of collapse. It’s interesting that we want to mark the passing of life with these flowers that are artificial and are there for a poor metaphor. Flowers and vanitas are symbolizing the ephemerality of human life. You think of an actual flower and it has this obvious cycle. But the fake flowers don’t. But they also kind of do, because they’re getting weathered. I’m interested in the way we mark that mourning and how that starts to degrade over time.”
Credit: Hannah Kasper
Credit: Hannah Kasper
AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL
“Our kids get off the bus at 2. We take the hour long decompression time before doing homework. We do some outside stuff. They also like to listen to books from the library. Bernie loves to do Google Maps. He’s autistic and what he’s into, he’s into hard. We’re going to the Polar Express in Cleveland and he has mapped the entire area of Cleveland and the entire route of the train. We got to really benefit from the therapeutic services available for Montgomery County residents. There’s a really cool program called ‘Help Me Grow’. They sent out an awesome woman, the kids called her Aunt Amanda, who was a play therapist.”
BREAKING BARRIERS
“Generally there’s a kid going to some kind of activity. Bernie does a fun class called ‘Breaking Barriers’ at Funk Lab in Kettering, for kids with disabilities. Minnie takes jazz. They have piano lessons. That’s it, but it feels like there’s a bazillion things to do.”
SOUTHWEST COOKING
“And dinner. I’m a cooker. I always try to give people something they will like, so I’ll throw in some toast. I made albondigas last night, which is a Mexican meatball soup. It’s my favorite. I’ll make enchiladas and beans. Green chili stew this time of year.”
NINTH STREET WOMAN
“The kids watch a little screen time while we clean up and then it’s bath time, bedtime. I also go to bed so early. I usually read a little and then pass out. The best literary book I’ve read recently is ‘Ninth Street Women’. I usually read a gamut of suspense, genre, romance, sci-fi. I am a book nerd.”
MORE DETAILS
Follow Bogle on Instragam at instagram.com/bridgettebogle and check out her website at https://bridgettebogleart.com.
A DAY IN THE LIFE
Hannah Kasper writes the weekly “A Day In The Life” feature for the Dayton Daily News. Know someone she should write about? Reach Hannah by email at hannah.kasper@gmail.com.
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