Lot 47

Good condition. Light dust has settled into surface pigment throughout. A faint surface line running horizontal in the center (8cm). Work housed in a shadow box frame. Overall size: 126 x 83.5 x 7cm


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Leonard Joel makes no guarantee of the originality of mechanical or applied components. Absence of reference to such modifications does not imply that a lot is free from modifications.

Paul Boston: Inverted Relief Paintings, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2006, cat. no. 8 (label verso)

Payes, S., Untitled: Portraits of Australian Artists, Macmillan Publishers, Melbourne, 2007, p. 59 (illustrated)

Paul Boston's style is uniquely his own. His oeuvre is so incomparable to any other in the Australian art world that he exists almost in his very own genre.

While suffering a bout of hepatitis, Boston was held in isolation at a London hospital where he first started drawing a series of heads. He became intrigued by the marks and how each mark, no matter how small, could translate to something so large within the mind – how we can read so much meaning into something so seemingly slight.

Back in Australia at Preston Technical School, this focus was encouraged by his main art teacher, Dale Hickey. Hickey was mostly presenting ideas influenced by the perspectives of American Clement Greenberg, Conceptual Art, and Bruce Pollard at Pinacotheca which all became significant influences for Boston.

Boston's work is deceptively simple. Often using a monochromatic palette, he creates forms with thick outlines, used in such a way that they present an interplay between solid and void. The flat surface of the painting is often interrupted by spherical forms, convex shapes, or recesses as seen in Two Heads 2006. There is an interplay between yes and no, dark and light, soft and hard.

'Boston resists playing the visual notes that conventional thinking demands. He chooses instead to put in unorthodox twists and strange conceptual angles that you don't expect, frissons in logic and perplexing visual discords that will inexplicably build up into a hauntingly resonant beauty. Paul Boston's works often possess a serene tranquillity that defies verbal description. Outwardly they are so simple…yet so totally absorbing you can get lost in them: they are what they are, records of quiet and unfussed moments of creative contemplation.' – Christopher Heathcote