Lynn Boggess (b. 1958, USA)

THE LANDSCAPES OF LYNN BOGGESS

In this exhibition, Boggess presents a selection of his landscape paintings, the subjects of which reflect the diverse nature of West Virginia and its flora. Using all vertical formats, Boggess draws the viewer into the deeply receding spaces of his images. The pictures, devoid of human or animal habitation, focus on Nature, free of the influence of human activity. Boggess compels the viewer to contemplate each scene in turn, and finally the cycle of scenes: the lapse of hours; the alternating character of the rocks, of the trees and of the land; the turn of season. The paintings themselves become the spaces they portray.

In many large and small ways, Boggess' paintings reflect the entire tradition of landscape painting. When asked what major influences or past movements might have left their imprint, Boggess says that whatever images he might be studying at the time provide the nexus for his own work. Indeed, the viewers will find suggestions of the Romantics, the Luminists, the Impressionists, and the Expressionists. Yet, the artist does not set out to make his works conform to a preconceived style; rather, he melds the tradition and his own experience into a way of seeing and a style in landscape painting which is uniquely his own.

Stylistically reflective of European and American landscape painting, Boggess' work transcends the pitfall of betraying his predecessors and forges, in its place, an art of resolution and contemplation. Nature has been acknowledged in his work and accepted for what it has to offer in the way of healing and beauty. That last concept - beauty - is a loaded word in an age of art which often gives us truth with all its flaws and warts, or with the sophistication of irony, which is all-too-often uncomfortable with the idea that beauty is definable, desirable, or even necessary. Boggess' work cuts through such specious queries to a plainer truth: that beauty simply is ~ an unavoidable irrefutable fact of the natural world. In their unhedging presentation of this fact, Boggess' paintings offer solace and respite, even to the most casual of viewers, just as do the original locations in Nature which were his impetus.

In the best plein-aire tradition, Boggess has constructed several portable shelters for his outdoor painting. (Figure 21) He has, for some time, eschewed the use of the brush in favour of the trowel. (Figure 2) The cement trowel, even more than the first use of the artist's palette knife, which gave the Post-Impressionists of the late nineteenth-century a vehicle for piling on the pigment, presents a challenge to the painter because, with an undisciplined flick of the wrist, the artist could cut into or rip the surface of his canvas, destroying several days work.

Oil on canvas. 40" x 34"

Boggess has said that the technique presented a very tricky problem, until he was able to master the exact angle of wrist-to-trowel-to-canvas necessary to create a single leaf, a tree branch, or a patch of water. He uses primary colours, mixing them on his palette as he paints. This is Boggess' way of controlling the colour, rather than using premixed tubes of pigment, as some artists do. In numerous respects, Boggess' colouristic technique is a reflection of the master painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as his plein-aire work is a reflection of the Impressionists' direct approach to Nature and, like the Impressionists, he paints what he sees. Taking to the open in, quite literally, all kinds of weather, Boggess paints his subject as he stands in its midst. If the snow seems to fly across the picture plane, it is because Boggess stood there, working against time and the elements. (Figure 14) When viewers say to him, "I feel as if I am really in the picture," it is surely because Boggess was there when he painted it.

The largest scale of many of the paintings, 80" x 68", may help to explain, in part, the sense the viewer has of entering the scene. The pictures seem, in ways other painters have not been able to achieve, to give the viewer a real door onto Nature. In Boggess' work, his focus is upon the elements of nature, concentrated within the small section he has chosen to show. Although there is the certain understanding that the actual landscape is much more extensive than we see in a single picture, there is no heroic expanse, no inhabited scene to tell us what occupation is carried out within it, nor is there a sense of sentimentality or nostalgia in the picture's presentation. (Figures 3, 12, 13) In fact, Boggess has carefully omitted all evidence of human presence. Unlike Romantic landscapes which show the magnificence of Nature pitted against the smallness of human endeavor, or the ravages of humanity upon the natural world, Boggess' works focus our attention exclusively upon the trees, the light filtering through them, or the reflections of the sky and its light upon the water. These are pictures for refreshment: of our eyes, of our psyche. They are small stopping places along the way.

There are no animals; there are no fences; there are no deposits of waste in the streams. Boggess gives us Nature, seemingly pure and undefiled. For him, and for his viewers, Nature in its pure state has the capacity to heal, and that is where Boggess brings his attention and, with it, ours. The artist often chooses not to paint precisely what he sees. Rather, he eliminates all of the human detritus. He leaves out the barbed wire and the old tires washed onto the streams' banks. Boggess gives us meditative bits of landscape without assuming any tone of preaching to his viewing public, and without heightening or saddening it, either. For him, Nature is an embodiment of beauty, of what we now have and must protect. For viewers who have any acquaintance with the natural world, these pictures resonate with memory, with experience, and create for them a respite from frenetic routine.

Oil on Canvas, 64" x 54"

In Figure 6, Pocahontas County, WV, May 2002, Boggess makes a subtle reference to the landscapes of the English Pre-Raphaelites, though one might miss it, because he removes all trace of the intrinsic nostalgia of the original. In the Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the finely-detailed, exquisitely-coloured landscape would have been merely a backdrop for an illustration from medieval or Renaissance literature, or an interpretation of the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their Romantic colleagues. Instead, here we see the delicate greens and the enticing suggestion of a path through the woods, a scene of beckoning vigour.

Figure 3 and 8, Wirt County, WV, July 2002 and Pocahontas County, WV, July 2002, give us a glimpse of the influence of the American Luminists, particularly the work of Thomas Worthington Whittredge. There is, in these two paintings, the subtle use of light, in small and concentrated areas, which recalls one of the best of the Luminists' understanding of light in Nature. Again, Boggess has absorbed what he learns from the tradition of landscape painting, but his use is always suggestive, never imitative.

In an age when painters for so long have given over the search for beauty, the work of Lynn Boggess comes as a welcome change from the muddied colours and discouraging representations of the land which have so frequently appeared in American exhibitions of the past two decades. Each of the scenes, whether large or small, compels the viewer by its seductive application of the paint, and by the subject itself. Such an example is Figure 7, Pocahontas County, WV, June 2002, the study of a rhododendron. Boggess painted this, a rather uncharacteristic extreme close-up, while he was tucked into his Summer shelter, wrapped about in plastic sheeting, awaiting the end of a rain storm. Typically, the painter painted what he had at hand. The result is lush in its application of paint, and is a technical tour-de-force in its use of the cement trowel, a single stroke of which produces each leaf. The recessive space, so effective in most of Boggess' works, is gone here, but the viewer has, in its place, a breathtaking first-hand experience of looking at - confronting - the flowers. Once more, the artist has brought the viewer into Nature, this time right against the brush, still wet with rain. It is possible, here, to see Boggess' use of primary colours, as he has slashed through the impasto of the paint to the flat surface of the canvas, revealing colour as he scrapes. This same method is visible in Figure 5, Ohio County, WV, May 2002, a chronicle of the erosion of a stream bank.

Oil on canvas. 46 x 54 cm.

Even the smallest of the canvases, the Winter scenes, (Figures 15-20), bring the viewer into direct experience with Nature. Snow is a difficult thing to paint because, while we "see" it as white, and the scene as monochromatic, white in fact encompasses all the colours of the spectrum, thus giving the painter a knotty task: painting one colour from all colour, without making a garish scene. Boggess succeeds. We feel the quality of the cold air; we understand, by his restrained suggestion of the colours in the snow, almost but not quite breaking through the surface of the ice crust, the brilliance of the light, especially clear in Figure 19, Monongalia County, WV, February 2003.

In Boggess' stylistically heavy application of the paint, in his roughly-textured surfaces, he is closest to the German painter Anselm Kiefer, a post-World War II Expressionist, whose use of landscape reverberates with the devastation of the Nazis. His landscapes are wounded, bleeding, unquiet, all seemingly opposite qualities to the work of Lynn Boggess, yet the two share many attributes, especially their aggressive, unflinching approach to subject.

The landscapes of Lynn Boggess give us a year-round walk in the woods. They provide us with a series of meditations on beauty; they give us an opportunity to consider the importance of Nature to our own experience. They also contain, in small subtle ways, much of the history of landscape painting. Because Boggess has chosen to paint Nature directly, and because he sees it as beautiful and endangered, he draws us into his fierce political vision. Because that vision is so disciplined that the artist presents it for us, without commentary, we may choose for ourselves which memory to recall; which path to take.

Marian J. Hollinger, Curator

James David Brooks Memorial Gallery

Fairmont State College

Rapids on the New River.

Oil on canvas. 54 x 64 cm,

Oil on canvas. 26" x 22"

Oil on canvas. 22" x 26"

Oil on canvas. 30" x 26"

oil on canvas. 46 x 40

Oil on canvas. 20" x 17"

oil on canvas. 12 x 24

Oil on canvas.

"14 February, 2006"

Oil on canvas. 46" x 40"

http://www.lynnboggess.com/