Charles Boggs: Roots of His Art

The Roots of My Art
I won't try to explain why I do what I do or where the 'inspirations' come from. It is said that Picasso was once asked if he could explain a certain painting to the viewer. He replied, 'Do you ask a bird to explain his song?' On another occasion, he was asked, 'How long did it take you to finish this particular painting ?' To which the Maitre answered, 'All my life right up until today when I signed it.'
I have this early memory. My mother made beautiful patchwork quilts of the unused or worn fabrics left over from making clothing for the family. The varieties of patchwork quilts my mother and her friends made were strange and wonderful. Especially the ones that were not specifically patterned, just loose patchwork with compositions based on how much of this or that cloth was around. Shapes were sometimes completely haphazard. One of my favorite ways of playing by myself was to set up a couple of chairs on the sunny end of the downstairs porch of the farmhouse and then stretch a patchwork quilt over the backs of the chairs. I had a tent which I imagined was a house of brightly colored walls. And I became the center of this flood of magic light. This, most certainly, 'colored' my later ideas of what to paint on canvas.
Daisies! Sometimes a hillside full of them! They were detested because the cows ate them and spoiled the milk. Sometimes, when we had a daisy dilemma, my father tried paying the kids, including me at about 10 years, to pull them up at 5 cents an hour. The scheme never worked because we became tired after one hour and, anyhow, were satisfied with the single nickel each of us got; for that was enough to buy a Nehi soda pop in the general store in Dwarf. I owe my modest talent to looking at flowers as well as patchwork quilts and stained glass windows (in churches, yet ! !) and landscapes seen from airplanes and all those fishy happenings in coral reefs and rainbows and parades and jungle wild life and the Aurora Borealis and ... and ... and ... and just about everything in Nature's displays of her magic collages of colors. And, of course when I paint and paste papers on canvas I am celebrating my everyday way of staying abstinent.
I recall the wisdom of my University of Kentucky professors of many, many years ago: Raymond Barnhart and Clifford Amyx. I visited Barnhart a couple of times in California and he and his wife visited me in Paris in the late years. I was known as 'Our Man in Paris' to them. My experience confirms my profs' collective suggestions in the early 40s. One of them was a student of the Bauhaus movement. That, too, helped me a lot in my later liberation from 19th century thinking and notions of space on the picture plane. I'm still exploring that space.
Now I do not need to refer directly to Nature in order to paint. I don't think of things, objects, when I work. I try to PRESENT, not to REPRESENT.
I call Cezanne 'my master' and 'my liberator' because he first used shifting planes of color to show shifting planes of light in his work. He first started deliberately overlapping planes of transparent color in what my old professors used to call 'a builded manner.' He moved the eye of the beholder around those apples in sections; he took you to the top of Mont Ste Victoire by helping you move from one 'bench' to the other. All with 'builded' colors, one color lap over another. I found one which pleased me especially [Mont Ste. Victoire, 1906] for it shows how the master used planes of transparent colors and tones to give 'body' to the objects he painted. Many of his works show this use of shifting color planes which make for a variety of tonalities and elaborate the space and forms by sheer mass of colors. This always fascinated me.
Matisse, too. He was a painter of joy.
I have just discovered Hans Hofmann and realize what a great teacher he must have been. But he told his students much of what my professors at the University of Kentucky told me from the beginning of my years in college in 1941. It took me another 30 years to begin using the ideas of Cezanne and others when I discovered Japanese silk paper and began to use acrylic colors to tone the paper with my first collages when I started my abstinence from drinking in 1970. Hofmann wrote, among other things : 'To sense the invisible and to be able to create it -- that is art.' And: 'Space pictorially realized through the intrinsic faculty of the colors to express volume.' I was moved by Hofmann's approach to painting and his notions about the affective use of color, form and space to touch the human mind. He was, as far as I can see, on the right path which my professors at the University of Kentucky had laid out for me in the 40s.
There was a hiatus in the 80s when I made large watercolors only, a period of almost 15 years. I began making the collages again in 1990 and combined collage with use of direct painting with acrylics in the way I still do.
When I discovered Japanese silk paper about 30 years ago I found I could tone it with more or less transparent colors and glue the different colors on the canvas (collage = paste-up) and get many, many different tones. I made a number of large landscapes in this manner and, over the years, began to remember Miro, Kandinsky and Paul Klee.
	I started shifting away from horizontal constructions and began, about 1990, to play with what I had learned. I paste on some vertical 'planes' of the toned Japanese paper, then some horizontal planes. Then I may paint in with acrylics other colors and tones. Then I paste some more planes of different colors or tones on top of some of these areas. And so on. Sometimes I don't finish a picture in a month of watching how the colors, shapes, tones, and planes work together.
	Once I begin to see a pattern that specifies need of this addition or that, I begin the slow start towards a 'finish line.' Maybe more days or weeks. But I finally get the pictures done. Last year I made only 15 pictures. Some large, some small. So far this year I have finished only 7 pictures. A few of the pictures I've made in the past 4 years do not satisfy me now. But very few. I think my work is improving. And it's about time, I reckon. If I make it that far I'll be 80 in a couple of years
I once heard that there is no black in Nature. I believe that. If Nature abhors a vacuum, then Nature always adds some kind of color to what we call black. There is always reflection of surrounding colors. I haven't used black by itself from the tube of paints for years although I do mix black with colors once in a while for shading.
I study my work as I go along; watching the shifting colors, the spaces, the challenging white spaces to be pasted on or painted. Since I have no plan for 'imitating Mother Nature.' I work as my neurons and dendrites permit me. I recognize Klee colors, Kandinsky shapes, but not so geometric as much of Kandinsky's work becomes. I don't have the humor of either Miro or Klee.
I just play away watching the spaces, the shapes, the coming and going of light and colors and tones. The work can be a mish-mash for a while as I'm covering all that white canvas. But sooner or later it begins to dance and sing and to hold together at the same time within the flat space available on the canvas. And even then I watch it for a while. The dancing forms and colors must, finally, hold a unity on the flat canvas but deep and shallow space will play with light and color. In a good picture, the result is movement and alternative 'settling:' a temporary union of the units. Then the eye of the beholder gets picked up again to explore. Sometimes the impression is a veritable labyrinth. Play hide-and-seek on a Charley canvas.
It's all for joy and for activating the brain. Wake up and watch Mother Nature's great color panorama. Enjoy. Everything I do is ABOUT Nature -- felt without giving names to things or forms and describing events. No reporting. No illustrations to inform how life operates or to show humanity at its best or worst. Nothing but challenges for the eye-mind.
		Left: Charles Boggs in his Montparnasse Studio, 1999 Contact the artist Exhibit Curator: Martin Nicolaus, Berkeley, California
All images of works by Charles Boggs copyright © 1985-2000 Charles Boggs, Paris, France. All rights reserved. This exhibit copyright © 1999, 2000 as a compilation, LifeRing Press.

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