Art & Life with Jim Boden

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jim Boden.

Jim, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I didn’t take my first art class until I was a senior in high school. I went to college with the intention of studying English. I wanted to be a writer. While in college, I took art classes every quarter as electives. At the end of my sophomore year, one of my professors asked what major I was going to declare. When I stated either English or History, he suggested I might consider art. I had never thought of art. But at that moment, a “boom” went off in my head and I never looked back.

I received a BS in Art Education from the University of Minnesota in 1974 and taught HS art for 20 years. Then, in 1994, I went to the University of Cincinnati for my MFA in Drawing. I chose Cinci for its figurative tradition and it was only one of six institutions that offered an MFA in Drawing.

In 1999, I began a 17-year stint of teaching Studio Arts – painting, drawing, photography, and Contemporary Critical Theory – at Coker College, Hartsville, SC. I retired in 2016 as Professor Emeritus.

Since then, I have been spending the majority of my time in my studio. I owe a great debt to the professor who suggested I think about majoring in Art.

Can you give our readers some background on your art?
Figure, figurative, figuration are states that have wandered through my work.

In the mid-late ’70s, I was very involved in the Mail Art movement, making very Fluxus spirited work. Small, absurd collages and pamphlets which I mailed around the world or placed in cubbyholes of commerce around St Paul and Minneapolis.

I think there is a thread of thought from those works which carries into my new work.

Presently, I have been working on a series – Out of Paradise. The concept is “what if Adam and Eve made the existential decision to leave the Garden… not driven out but chose to go out a-wanderin’?”
Thinking of the tropes of journeys; Inferno, Odyssey, Ulysses, The Wasteland – religious and cultural mythologies, the Theater of the Absurd, philosophy – all became fodder for political, social, relationships, class, gender images. I begin with collages of “actions” set against a watercolor background – to be a bit like the painted landscapes behind the studio photographs of the 1800s. I think of them as moments in a play, a captured moment – either a climactic moment of the implied narrative or the transitional “action before the action.” The viewer is presented with this moment to complete the narrative.

I use some of these collages for resource subjects for my small-scale paintings of the same series.

How do you think about success, as an artist, and what quality do you feel is most helpful?
Success is having the luxury of a great deal of time to spend on my work. It is a part of art that is so hard to come by. To have the time to contemplate the work, to make false starts, to focus without distractions – so important, so difficult to get.

Contact Info:

• Address: 401 Norwood Ave
  Hartsville, SC 29550
• Website: jimboden.net
• Email: bodenjim7@gmail.com
• Instagram: bodenjim7

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