Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Bukovnik moved to the West Coast in 1974. His work is in numerous museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Brooklyn Museum; Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pittsburgh; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Commissions and private collections range from the New York Metropolitan Opera to Neiman-Marcus and the San Francisco Symphony, and to corporations like Time, Metropolitan Life, and Citibank. Bukovnik’s paintings go beyond mere botanical illustration. He is a painter who is surprising in his sensitivity and clarity, states a reviewer in El Punto de las Artes [Madrid]. The realized works are treated with precision and imagination. His still lifes come alive, images that motivate and invite the viewer to see, sense and admire them. Underscoring this observation, Judith Gordon writes in Flowers: Gary Bukovnik Watercolors and Monotypes, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York: "Poised between imagination and reality, his paintings show a remarkable sense of balance: the work of an artist who is well-acquainted with the form of flowers as well as their spirit." Bukovnik’s watercolors and monotypes are the subject of "Flowers: Gary Bukovnik Watercolors & Monotypes", published by Harry N. Abrams, New York. This book includes a foreword by James J. White, curator at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation; an interview with the artist by Robert Flynn Johnson, curator at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; and an essay about Bukovnik and the depiction of flowers in art by Judith Gordon, a San Francisco-based writer.