Lynn Boggess: The Twentieth Year

Lynn Boggess returns on Friday, April 25th for a very special solo exhibition titled The Twentieth Year. The show marks Lynn’s 20th year exhibiting with Principle Gallery! The Opening Reception will be that evening from 6-8:30 pm. Lynn will be in attendance.

Lynn Boggess is a plein air landscape painter who grew up on a farm near Parkersburg, West Virginia. Growing up in such a rural area allowed Boggess to roam creek beds and hillsides as a child. He received a BA in Art Education from Fairmont State College in 1978 and an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1980. From 1990 through 2007, Boggess was a Professor of Art at Fairmont State College, where he spent years exploring phenomenology and metaphysics in art. Between the years of 1979 and 2000, the artist experimented with a variety of styles, from minimalist abstraction to postmodern-layered imagery. However, during a break from the studio one day in 2000, Boggess decided to go outside to create some nature studies. He picked up a cement trowel on a whim, which then led to an entire summer of artistic exercises. His goal that summer was to create 100 small paintings to see where his new process would take him. Once those 100 paintings were complete, what began as a diversion became an obsession.

“The challenge behind what Boggess does with impasto painting, is to allow the paint to have an expressive force that is inherent to thick, fluid oil paint, while insisting it achieve as much realism as possible. ‘Those two objectives are not, by nature, easily compatible…,” he says. It’s difficult. Very difficult. And that’s what has sustained my interest in it throughout the decades I have been painting. I can honestly say I have never had a boring session. The unpredictable character of painting wet in wet with thick paint is always fascinating. I can’t imagine any other way.” – excerpt from the article Texture Breathes Life by Chelsea Koressel, American Art Collector, Issue 234.