Searching for Meaning with artist Dave Boal

Posted on: 11 October 2024 in Posts

Dave Boal standing in front of a piece of his art.

The LCI space has recently been displaying art work by local artist Dave Boal. Join us 16th October 2024 at 4pm for a special Language Exchange session as Dave talks us through his work, techniques, shape and colour.

I was an Art Teacher in Merseyside for 34 years. Teaching is a rewarding but demanding job.

In order to continue my own work I developed a method of painting that allowed me to work on small areas at a time. The process involves a lot of looking at the canvas to determine each step in turn and usually takes a long time to arrive at a solution.

The first step in all my work is to divide the blank canvas into shapes, often arrived at by using chance methods, for example, throwing dice, or tossing coins to determine the number of vertical, horizontal and diagonals, right or left. The large green and red paintings are examples of this linear method.

Later on, the work became less linear and more organic, although chance still played a role. By pouring paint onto the surface and moving the canvas around, tilting it at different angles, the trickles of paint create shapes all over the picture plane.

Then it was searching for the way forward to organise and use colour to bring out the meaning of each painting.

Another important element of the work is the use of collage.

Collages take “found” pieces of discarded reality and put them together to find and form new meanings. For example, the circular motifs represent the view out of the portholes on a boat. The smaller abstract works are colour-based “collages” of acrylic paint applied for the most part with a palette knife.

In any creative process there are three elements.

  1. The intention of the maker
  2. The finished work
  3. These two are only completed by the interpretation of the viewer.