Artist Profile Eric Boos

Boos’s spectacular geometric abstraction crystallizes fragmented memories into a vibrant, spatial cycle of endless rebirth.

Artist Statement

Overview and Vision:

I work abstractly because it gives me the greatest freedom to be both bold in my presentation and subtle in my expression. Abstraction allows me to explore shape, color, movement, and volume in ways that purely representational art obscures.

The concept of cyclical collapse and re-birth, in the broadest sense, has always been foundational to my thinking. Every week I go hiking in an area of massive granite boulders and hills that are over a billion years old. Along one side of this area is a 12 million year old volcano. The lava once flowed over some of the granite hills. The granite is slowly eroding into coarse sand. I usually see no one else on the trails. I feel deep time in that landscape, the endless cycle of collapse and re-birth. The Yavapai people used to hunt and camp here. Before them, the Sinagua People built small pueblos here, now just piles of stones. Before them, the pit house people lived here. We don’t have a name for them. And before them there were still others, who left only small traces of their passage. Most recently, it was part of a cattle ranch. There are still crumbling cattle bones scattered around. The cycles of collapse and re-birth never end.

I use basic geometric shapes for my paintings, because they are the foundational shapes of humanity. Geometry isn’t common in the natural world. My vision isn’t the cycle of collapse, but rather the cycle of re-birth, of starting over from the scattered fragments. I feel like the shapes in my paintings, while chaotic and imperfect, are trying to re-organize themselves into something recognizable, starting the next re-birth cycle.

Materials and Process:

I start by building a wooden panel. I use ¼” Revolutionply for the panel itself, and 1 x 2 select kiln-dried wood for the backing frame. I use acrylic paints from Nova Color, and Epson premium Luster photo paper (44” roll) for my shapes. I have built a set of white wooden pieces painted white and studded with magnets to construct temporary models, which I then photograph. I manipulate the photos using Photoshop to create a final image sketch. I lay out, to scale, the final image design on the photo paper, then cut out the shapes. The shapes are then painted and glued to the panel using acrylic medium as the adhesive.

Artist Biography

You can call me either Eric or Mr. Boos (rhymes with nose). I’ve been a professional artist since the 1980’s, working mostly in high-end ceramic sculpture, primarily selling through galleries around the country.

A few years ago I decided that I had done all I wanted to with ceramics, and that all that dust wasn’t healthy. So I returned to the painting of my graduate school days. My painting practice has evolved, both technically and conceptually. You can read more about that in my Artist Statement.

I am married. I have three adult children, all successful. I live in a house I designed and built, with a lot of help from my wife. I like to ride my motorcycle. As a child we lived on a farm in central California, producing raisins. As an eight year old I drove the tractor, manual shift, for my father and swam in irrigation canals. It was a now-vanished world from a John Steinbeck novel. I didn’t like wearing shoes.