Introduction His canvases seem to glow and to heat a room.  His colors radiate life, high summer, the fullness of joy.  His images seem three-dimensional and alive.  At the center of his compositions, raging currents and colliding light-beams burst into explosions of exuberance.  He works his magic with bits of Japanese silk paper and acrylics.  Incredibly, these are collages!  The viewer fortunate enough to study an original up close can see the silk threads, and may deduce how the artist applies layer upon layer of vividly dyed swatches, interlaced with strokes of the brush, to create the incandescent compositions that are his trademark. No one has done collages like this.  From the work of Cezanne, Boggs learned to create space with layered colors.  Matisse inspired the courage to paint joy.  Barnhart, Amyx, Kandinsky, Klee, and Miro  were among his teachers of composition.  But the end product is uniquely Boggs.  Instantly recognizable, the collages of Charles Boggs are found in collections all over the world.  The artist, now a vigorous 81, lives and works in a studio in Montparnasse.  He has breathed the air of Paris for half a century, and rubbed elbows with the greats of the Parisian artistic and literary world.  The art history books of the future will include him as one of them.  Yet underneath his Left Bank sophistication lies a simple country boy from the Cumberland hills of Kentucky, U.S.A.  On sunny days as a boy, he loved to put two chairs together on the farm house porch, spread his mother's patchwork quilt over them, get inside, and become the center of a magic flood of light.

Start | Introduction | 2002 | 2001 | 2000|  1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 | 1990-1995 | The Artist | Roots