Colors of Exuberance: 

Charles Boggs Collages 1990 - 2002

A Kentucky native who has lived and worked in Paris since 1950, Charles Boggs has evolved a distinct personal style: vibrant abstract compositions executed in vivid colors.  The Colors of Exuberance cyber-show features more than 70 of Boggs' collages from the period 1990-present.  In this period the artist left representationism behind and established himself as an abstract expressionist.  Boggs has been sober 28 years and is active in the secular recovery movement in France.  The exhibit includes an illustrated autobiography and a brief essay in which Boggs traces his artistic roots.

Art by Kim Park
"I am working on a Creative Recovery program to incorporate art, nutrition, and fitness into an addiction program. I really believe in art as an a way to externalize the internal. I've lived it. Experienced the benefits of it...especially in the last year. The women I teach are going through many different emotions and I try and help them to focus on one particular. Or on many. Something I do in my own painting as well."

Intervention Prediction:  None.
Collage by Jenifer S.
Collage inspired by a poem about the randomness of life and how much of what comes about for us may just be about the time and place where we are.

Collages and a Canvas
by Leeza V. 
The artist is a member of the Oakland LifeRing Monday Night Codependency Group.  Her collages and a canvas are a means of self-discovery, advancing recovery through artistic expression.

Drinking Like a Fish, by Lisa E. Pen and Ink with watercolor fill, 1997.
We've all heard the phrase, "drink like a fish." But nobody's ever tried to visualize what that would look like. Not until Oakland art student Lisa E., that is, whose fine Rapidograph etched this finny funnyman in the contortion that would be required to become an imbibing ichthyoid.

Advertising Art Tackles Drinking: Three Posters

What do you think of these "anti-drinking" posters?  (Click for larger images.)  To some eyes, they poke fun at drinking.  To others, they glorify it.  It all depends on your point of view.  Go to the Forum for a discussion.

Starting to Breathe:  Two Acrylics by Richard Davies

Richard Davies is an English artist and a member of SOS in Bristol.  After getting sober in 1992, he began to rediscover his creativity.  He started to paint regularly and then attended drawing classes with live models, and here are two of them.  He writes that he feels his works are finished "when they start to breathe" -- these certainly do. 

Untitled Photograph of Man with Bottle and Gun, Photograph by Tom Holmes, ca. 1977.

Robert B. contributed this photograph of a man next to a brick wall, contemplating a bottle and a revolver on a small table in front of him. Taken about 20 years ago, this photograph is another glimpse of the dark side of drinking. Art like this is important to counteract in some small measure the "fun" image of drinking in the commercial media.

After the Party, by Georgia Ryan. Watercolor and mixed media, ca. 1985.

The contemporary San Francisco artist Georgia Ryan strengthened her sobriety by painting this portrait of herself as glimpsed in the bathroom mirror between retches after a night of drinking. Posted by permission of the artist. Copyright © 1997 Georgia Ryan. Photographed by Marty N. Scanned and digitally prepared by Craig M. (7/7/97)

The Art of Adam Clay

The art of Adam Clay reveals a young artist's experimentation with different styles and media.  The collection on this page shows two main trends.  There is Adam Clay the representative artist, whose "Spiritual Influence" shows a rapturous Carlos Santana in the foreground with some of his musical influences ghostlike in the sky behind him.  This Adam's hand created the loving pastel portrait of Maurice the cat, and is able to wring softness and warmth even from computer hardware ("Single Mother").  He uses oils to give the hard zeroes and ones of digital image reproduction a warm analog fuzziness ("Out of Focus").  But there is also the other Adam Clay: the creator of "Gridlock" and "Inside the Vortex": images that hover on the eerie borderline between pure abstraction and scientific drawing.  These are imaginary visions of abstract flowing and intertwisted shapes, but executed with such precision and draftsmanship that they evoke scanning electron micrographs of some particularly tangled corner of the human brain.  Aren't these self-portraits of a mind trapped in addiction, tearing itself limb from limb?  The artist is in recovery, and actively painting and sketching, in Oakland CA.

Paintings by Mark P. Fisher

Looking back with newly sober eyes on these paintings of his drinking years, Mark P. Fisher is struck with the way his art unintentionally seemed to comment on his addictive experience.  In Victims of the Fire, the characters display a distorted sentimentality and a craven attachment to their drugs against the background of a world in flames.  Portrait of Don shows the destruction of this friend's character by alcoholism.  Pope Gladius IX is a sarcastic comment on a certain person's  grandiose self-image.  His still life, Alcools, executed in black and white oils, expresses the chromatic poverty of the world of addiction.

Monsters I Have Been, by  Siobhan

As part of her healing process, Chicago Art Institute graduate Siobhan constructed these monster dolls.  Made of found objects, preferably human artifacts that have been manipulated and worn over time, these sculptures draw their inspiration from the artist's past life of addiction.   Now more than five years clean and sober, Siobhan is fascinated with processes of change.   Her compositions use traditional materials and techniques to create a healing surge into the future.

Night Into Day, by Maurits Escher.

 

Drawings and Collages by Clay Young

Clay Young is a contemporary American artist residing on Emerald Isle off the coast of South Carolina. These four drawings and collages on sobriety themes are copied by permission of the artist from his own home page, formerly at http://www.nternet.net/~clayyoung/rec-main.html.

• The Big Headache. Reading sobriety books while drinking can bring the conflict within the individual to the raging point and cause a powerful headache. Sooner or later the individual will put away either the bottle or the books.

• Death Wants a Drink. Alcoholism is a fatal disease; if unchecked, death is the certain outcome. The voice of craving inside is the voice of the fleshless skull. Collage for a poster.

• Allegorical Nightmare. The artist's experience in AA inspired this allegorical cartoon. Despite the "Big Book," the "Higher Power" (symbolized by the doorknob) and the "spiritual awakening" (symbolized by the light bulb), the dreamer is "Out" (drunk), victim of the unchecked "lizard brain" within him (symbolized by the T-rex). Its appetite only awakened, the monster eyes a pixie (a new AA recruit) going down the "steps" as its potential dessert.

• You Are Not Powerless. Collage and drawing for a poster.