West Virginia artist Lynn Boggess presents an untouched vision of nature that transports the viewer to the reflective and pure environment in which his landscapes are created. By means of plein-air techniques and the use of cement trowels as brushes, an innovative approach to oil paint is realized, resulting in works that are simultaneously dynamic and soothing. These landscapes overwhelm the senses with lush and vivid scenes while also allowing room for meditation on the deeper relations between human life and the natural world.
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 the season. The paintings themselves become the spaces they portray.
In many large and small ways, Lynn Boggess's paintings reflect the entire tradition of landscape painting…yet, the artist does not set out to make his works conform to a preconceived style; rather, he melds the tradition and his own experiences into a way of seeing and a style in landscape painting which is uniquely his own.
"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. When viewers say to him, "I feel as if I really am in the picture," it is surely because Boggess was there when he painted it.
Marian J. Hollinger, Curator
Lynn Boggess grew up on a farm near Parkersburg, West Virginia. He received a BA in Art Education from Fairmont State College and an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He has been Professor of Art at Fairmont State College since 1990 and Coordinator of the Art Department since 2002. He has been honored with several prestigious awards in West Virginia, including the Higher Education Art Educator of the Year in 2001, Visual Artist of the Year in 1999, and the Governor's Award of Excellence in Painting in 1997. His landscapes have been acquired by both public and private collectors, locally and internationally, including the West Virginia Governor's Mansion, SAS Institute, and Eisai, Inc.
It’s the rare artist who can capture and convey the energy of nature on a two-dimensional surface. Lynn Boggess is one. His plein-air paintings of the backwoods forests and rivers in his native West Virginia pulsate with dynamism and movement; they’re wide-awake with color, light, and perspective. Using variously sized cement trowels as his brush allows Boggess to take himself and the viewer far beyond the soft focus of the Impressionists, the American Luminists (even beyond the action paintings of Jackson Pollock), past the world of trompe l’oeil, and into one verging on the perspectival layers found in Marcel Duchamp’s ingenious viewfinder tableau, the Étant Donnés. Where Duchamp united the sublime to the disturbing, Boggess aims only for the former – and often arrives at something very much like transcendence. Like nature itself.
~Devon Jackson, published in the Santa Fean, 2010
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