Navigation System

Navigation System

Bryan LeBoeuf

October 16, 2023—December 13, 2023

Opening reception November 9, 2023 6-7:30pm

Artist's Statement

I paint the relationships of things. When I come to an image that can cut both ways, standing at a pictorial crossroads and presenting an open-ended narrative, it feels like lightning in a bottle. It's a one-eighty; you can come back to it: the picture doesn't change, but we do. One day it's a baptism, the next it's a drowning. Is this figure a mosh pit of celebration or a cruciform, deposed body? To me, the most potent paintings have a quality of "narrative impressionism". In visual impressionism, the image is completed optically. With an impressionistic narrative, your brain is required the compete the meaning.

In general, I begin with an idea, and end with an idea. I have the concept first, and then try to make it plausible, whether that means drawing from life or using photographic references. Illusion interests me, the notion that painting can be a window into another world. Oil paint is the primary vehicle by which I try to achieve this, because few things can get to illusion like it. Oil paint can be both transparent and opaque, and thereby provides endless options. It's like having an engine with maximal pistons: you may not use all of them, but they're available. That said, I regularly look to "triage" my studio practice by switching up media between oils. charcoal, and oil pastels.

Plein air painting is a tool for revitalizing the process and stirring things up. To some extent it's always been a a part of my process in some way, and each approach enhances the other. Painting outside, directly from life, stands in contrast to the more heady, plodding strategies of making pictures in a studio. It brings me back to the most immediate, intimate qualities of painting. Plein air is not so much about what you plan but what you intuit. You are now tethered to time, to light, and all the materials of what you're doing in a way that you're not when in the deliberate, controlled environment of the studio. it's on the fly. Light changes, weather changes. On the other hand, you can contemplate in the studio in a way you cannot with plein air; it's a different part of the brain, it's a different muscle.

—Bryan LeBoeuf