THE SEMI-FINALIST
4/11/2024 The Semi-finalist is: Pat BoasUntitled 2023, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 24" x 22" I have been a fan of Pat Boas’ work for over a decade, and its evolution has been a source of both fascination and inspiration. As a longtime viewer, it’s been interesting to note how the visual grammar in her recent paintings is related to her earlier conceptual and text based works. In Script 1 (2023), for example, sweeping, fluid gestures paired with skittering, semi-transparent dry-brush strokes and geometric sharpness hint at numerals and the alphabet. And it’s not out of the ordinary to find cartoonish profiles or the silhouette of a bottle tucked into some of her newer compositions, as in SL3 (also from 2023). It’s in this new work, too, that another side of Boas’s temperament starts to assert itself: overt signs and cryptic symbols regularly give way to unnameable forms and the allusion to language dissolves into planes of color, shape and texture. Even here, however, one can see that she is hanging onto her past aesthetic temperament as much as she is letting go of it. A piece like Saturday Painting #10 maintains the swooping cadence of a calligrapher even as the brushstrokes resist giving us a recognizable reference point. I get the sense that Boas is not so much saying goodbye to what has come before in her decades long career, but is instead greeting new interests with an open mind to what’s possible. In several of these charming and fresh “Saturday Paintings,” the directness of Boas’s hard-edged geometry is supplanted by lush atmospheres that skillfully retain their chromatic intensity. In these small works (often only 10” x 8”) we see the artist’s penchant for rigorous definition giving way to the joys of unapologetic ambiguity. It’s as if a singer on stage has graciously and confidently stepped aside so the band can have a go at improvising without vocals; narration takes a well deserved break while the feeling carried through pure sound is given an opportunity to move the story forward. Under Boas’s direction, this is never a complete rejection of the recognizable signs that illustrate, but rather an understanding that it’s often the suggestive pull of what is unsaid that slips in under our skin and stays with us. This month I'm happy to share a recent interview with Portland, Oregon based artist Pat Boas. -David Schell Saturday Painting #11 (float) 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8" The Semi-Finalist: How did you get started as an artist? Pat Boas: I had one of those hero art teachers in high school who opened a lot of things up for me. As a child of the ‘60s, though, there was no straight path. I graduated from high school a year early and was making my way through my first year at Kent State University, but that came to an abrupt end when, during a protest against the US invasion of Cambodia, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed 4 students and wounded 9 others. Though I didn’t see the shooting, I was on campus that day and it shook my world. Naturally, the school shut down and I went to visit a friend in New York City for a two-week trip that stretched to a year. Coming from a small town in northeastern Ohio, it was pretty intoxicating. I took classes at the Art Students’ League, worked at various jobs, and explored. When I went back to Ohio, I made a serious attempt at finishing up my BFA. I’d say that Don Harvey, an artist who taught modern and contemporary art history at Akron University, filled the mentor role. Don organized frequent student trips to New York to look at shows and meet some of the working artists he knew. A handful of us rented a huge space for studios in a former dance school over a dive bar in downtown Akron (my rent for the year was $130). There was a lot of good energy, good music, and a sense of community. Despite that, or maybe because of it, earning an art degree became to seem less educationally important than being out in the world. I had an invitation to join friends who were living in rural New Mexico, so I left for the west and lived for about a year in a small, reclaimed adobe house east of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. For the next couple of decades, I traveled and lived for spells in Berkeley, Paris, more NYC, Boulder, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Amsterdam. Many of the people I met and things I got involved in made an impact. In Paris, I stayed for some months at the storied Shakespeare & Company bookstore when George Whitman (who claimed to be a descendant of Walt) was still there. In Boulder I sat in on classes at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and did chapbook covers and broadsides for a small press. I worked at the Social Public Art Resource Center in LA, first as a studio assistant to an older Communist artist from Odesa, and later led one of the teams that worked on Judith F. Baca’s “Great Wall of LA,” a quarter-mile mural depicting the ethnic history of Southern California. I co-hosted “Poetry Readings in the Old Venice Jail” and worked with Political Art Documentation/Distribution (LA PAD/D). Then motherhood and family life took over. Above: Script 1 2023, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 30" x 24" Below: SL2 2023, flashe on canvas over panel, 24" x 22" S-F: I found so many of the things that we talked about in your studio to be relevant to your work, and I wanted to dig a little deeper into them here. Let's start off with your “Saturday Paintings” and how they fit into your overall approach to painting. PB: These are small panels I keep hanging around alongside larger work. I call them “Saturday Paintings” because Saturday mornings in my studios are usually times when I feel very focused. There’s no one else in the building, no trucks idling in the parking lot and somehow I seem to know what to do to with one or another of these little paintings that I keep brewing off to the side. Some finish quickly while others may go through multiple stages and redirections. I guess they serve as rehearsals, but their main importance is the way they help me think about what it means to resolve something. That keeps changing. It’s something that I’m always looking to change. I exhibited a few in a solo show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery this past fall and many more in a two-person exhibition with Michelle Ross last November at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon. To show them at Ditch, which is a very large, beautiful white space, I had to bring them from the periphery to the center. And this meant I had to quickly finish (or declare finished) some that had been only lightly touched. I have some uncertainty about that but the shift has made a difference in the way I’ve been working since. Above: Saturday Painting #4 (flame) 2023, flashe and milk paint on panel, 13" x 9" Below: Saturday paintings (and other things) on the studio wall. S-F: How do you cope with “the treachery of titles?” PB: I used to think it was ungenerous for an artist to not take the opportunity to position a work with words. Earlier, my titles tended to be descriptive or referenced a source, sometimes with an element of word play. Now I try to think about what each piece needs and don't see a reason to be consistent. I like the idea of placing language alongside an image, like an echo, or finding something that anchors it. I collect words or phrases and look for a good match, but sometimes it takes a while to know what a painting has become. A title that earlier made sense may not stick once the painting is done. In some cases, any language can seem too heavy or limiting. I sometimes envy painters who simply number works sequentially because that tends to make me focus on what is in front of me, on what I’m really seeing. Hat Trick 2022, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 30" x 24" S-F: When I was in your studio, you described the experience of a painting "looking back." Can you talk about that? PB: This thought took hold during a discussion in my painters’ group about one of Amy Bay’s gorgeous paintings. I think of it as a particular place in a work where formal and material forces draw together and create a node, a sense of presence, some kind of “aliveness”. Maybe it’s related to Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum in photography: literally a sharp point or tip, something that pierces. We all know it’s just inert material on a surface, but nonetheless I look for some point of tension, something that draws to it my own subjective looking and, crazy as it sounds, seems to return the gaze. Good Listener 2021, acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, 19 1/2" x 15 1/2" (installed on Bliksem, artist-designed wallpaper at Oregon Contemporary, February - March, 2022) S-F: Pat, your work over the last couple of decades has slowly inched away from overtly referencing its own conceptual foundations. Your current work - more than any other part of your career that I’m familiar with - appears to be painting that is about painting. Do you agree with that assessment? If so, can you talk about what is driving this transformation and where you see it going? PB: On the whole I think this is true but it does give me pause to think I am making paintings about painting, for that’s exactly the kind of thinking that drove me away from painting in the first place! Like many who had a 70s (or 80s) art education, my introduction to painting was that it was an indulgent and retrograde enterprise where ideas were not welcome. Harsh, right? (Amy Sillman has written about this in some of her essays.) For many years, I was all about concept, scuttling back and forth between drawing projects and printmaking – the latter for its distancing quality and relationship to commercial media. It was important to me to start with material that existed widely in the everyday and devise operations that would uncover something that was already there. I concentrated on visual constructions of reading and writing because I regarded text and the activities that generated and deciphered it as an incredibly mysterious brain technology – quite miraculous, actually. This is still important to me and always hovers somewhere around my work. ...we, we, waves (LG) 2014, gouache on paper, 22" x 15" Continued... Eventually I became frustrated with the limitations I was setting for myself and was drawn back to painting. I first made small, very detailed renditions of ordinary people who appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and then began using handwriting-as-image in larger works. Handwriting gave me a roadmap with a loose set of rules and unpredictable destinations. It was a kind of halfway-house that allowed me to confront my love-hate relationship with subjective form and the gestural mark. It took some time but eventually the space of the page in my earlier work became a field with figure-to-ground and object-to-frame relationships. Above: Untitled (purple-eye) 2019, acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, 19 1/2" x 14" Below: Saturday Painting #5 2023, flashe and milk paint on panel, 13" x 9" Continued... For the past several years I’ve been working to find ways to step off the well-defined tracks I have to lay to keep myself moving without drowning in chaos. I do a lot of generative drawing, automatic drawing, trying not to “make a picture” but rather allow what filters in from years of attending to different visual vocabularies to come through. I look for ways to navigate the tension between structure and impulse and find myself asking “what kind of a thing is this?” It’s a question I don’t expect an answer to because it all lies beyond the threshold of language. This does leave me without an easy way of talking about current work, for there is no longer a “something” that it’s about. Unless it’s about painting, as you suggest. I now feel that in itself is a tremendous charge, that painting is temporal and rich and deep. I recently came across a statement by the Belgian painter Ilse D’Hollander, who left a tremendous body of work during her short life (she died at the age of 29). D’Hollander wrote: “A painting comes into being when ideas and the act of painting coincide. When referring to ideas, it implies that as a painter, I am not facing my canvas as a neutral being but as an acting being who is investing into the act of painting.” I like this. It makes sense to me. Above: Saturday Painting #10 (amber) 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8" Below: Saturday Painting #8 (red T.N.) 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8" S-F: The surfaces in your recent work have become so richly varied, not just with color, but with texture and density as well. Talk about that. PB: I’ve always been interested in the tactility of vision, so the surface quality of a painting is important. At some point – it may have been when I took another look at the Pattern and Decoration work of the 70s – a long-dormant part of my visual DNA was activated, reaching back to the Polish immigrant side of my family whose tastes in decorating ran toward weirdly clashing colors, patterns, and tacky textures. I realized that most of my childhood memories involve interiors that were not at all aligned with American or western European ideas of visual harmony. Maybe that attuned me to the visual force of putting together things that do not belong. Nabokov (Russian, right?) wrote: “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.” I also think a lot about how sight and sound are connected. When I began painting letterforms, for instance, I thought a line bent to form a shape that might be recognized as a letter might also carry with it a sense of that letter’s sound or produce in the viewer the impulse to verbalize. Maybe it has more to do with rhythm and intervals, the patterning and textures of text, the spaces between and the act of visually deciphering. Contrast and color have a big job there. And much of it comes from figuring out how to negotiate shape, and especially, edge – the way the body senses and the brain responds. Above: Installation view at Ditch Projects (November, 2023) Below: Blue Grid 2023, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 23 1/2" x 17 1/2" S-F: I love the title of your current show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery - Idiom. Can you talk about where that comes from and how it relates to your recent work? PB: The work I had been making for the show kept splitting off in different directions and I wanted to follow each one, not curtail anything just to make it fit, to make a show. Lately, as must be apparent by now, I’ve been working to see what happens rather than directing it. I don’t have an interest in making it all cohere. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I want to see if I can make it cohere on its own. When it was nearing time to deliver the work to the gallery, some of the paintings seemed to have organized themselves into pairs that each shared a loose sense of genre (still-life-ish, landscapes, grid-based “scripts”) but there was no overarching theme. Idiom, which means a phrase whose meaning cannot be understood from the dictionary definitions of its component words, seemed to fit the situation. There’s an idea there about “compositionality” that I like, where one should be able to understand the whole if one understands the meanings of each of the parts. But with idioms, it doesn’t add up. They make a new meaning only through time and use. SL3 2023, flashe on canvas over panel, 24" x 22" S-F: Who are you looking at (living or dead)? PB: I just got back from a trip to the Netherlands where I saw many early Mondrian paintings at the Kunstmuseum den Haag, and there also was a beautiful and comprehensive exhibition that traced his development alongside his contemporary, Hilma af Klint. Earlier this year I saw Rebecca Morris at the MCA in Chicago. It feels so good to look at work in person again. I recently got my hands on the new big book on Miyoko Ito. And I’m always looking at Prunella Clough and Thomas Nozkowski for the way they made compositions that cannot not be taken apart. Historically, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Matisse, ’80s de Kooning, Shirley Jaffe, Raoul de Keyser, Kimber Smith. I cycle through a long list of contemporary (mostly women) painters such as Victoria Morton, Patricia Treib, Jana Schroder, Marley Freeman, Elizabeth MacIntosh, Julia Dault, Jonathan Lasker, Tomory Dodge. And lately I’ve been looking at Sherman Sam, Ilse D’Hollander, Varda Caivano and Cora Cohen. Above and below: on the studio walls. S-F: What’s next for you? PB: After my two fall exhibitions in 2023, it feels good to be working without a looming deadline. I’m represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and will likely do another solo there in 2025. I enjoyed working with Ditch Projects and would like to build more connections with artist-run spaces: it’s useful to see work in different contexts and I like working collaboratively with other artists. You can see more of Pat Boas's work: - on her website: patboas.com/work/view/3369696/1/7614193 - on the Elizabeth Leach Gallery website - on her instagram page - on the Ditch Projects website More Boas: The Artist in her Portland, Oregon studio.
Saturday Painting #1 2023, acrylic and flashe on canvas over panel, 15" x 12" Saturday Painting #3 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8" Saturday Painting (plus-blue) 2023, flashe on panel, 10" x 8" On the studio walls in 2024.
Comments are closed.
|