ethan boisvert




I like to highlight the absurdity of life in the complete abstract and narrative. Stories about conflict, harmony, discord, jealousy, love, hate, are shaken into a place where chaos challenges order. The paintings are a collage of ideas in abstraction made through a merging of process-based art as well as object-based narrative. In process, I often create sketches on impulse, like automatic drawing or like a musician with a simple riff or base line and build the melodies and structure upon that. Form is created through broad swashes of color. The rhythmic patterns are applied, and thus emerges an effect that creates a history, much like print making, overlaying an idea of the past with one of the moment, including direct painting, drips, and patterns produced by homemade printmaking tools as well as stencils. I have become deeply engaged with implementations of push and pull, crescendo, repetition, variation, condensed vs. expanded ground, happy accidents, etc. In the narrative, I take from stories in my life and however they come, what a coworker tells me, an incident in the street, books I read, or news and trends floating around in the now. I’d rather they be seemingly trivial moments that can easily be overlooked yet may have clout in other ways than driving home preconceived narratives, like an accidental robber, the little girl peeing her pants, drunk bum accosting me, my boss fighting with me over forty dollars. The result is that the subjects, with all their tension, find their way into the energy of the work without being an overtly nameable entity.