Meet John Boak | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with John Boak and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi John, do you have any habits that you feel contribute to your effectiveness?
What was your thought process behind starting your own business?

I graduated from college into a recession. Added to that is the fact that I had not thought too much about what to do after graduation. I did look for employment in those first few years. But I found it a lot easier to get design work, than to get design employment. So that is what I did.

Why did you pursue an artistic or creative career?

Creating visual forms and objects were a prime interest since early childhood. I also loved the realm of ideas, and the history of ideas. So visual arts were an obvious target of interest.

What habits do you feel helped you succeed?

I am self directed. I also had a wide skillset, including facility with language, and psychological awareness. One needs a broad kit of tools to be an entrepreneur, and help the clients.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I paint in oil on canvas. I paint digitally. I make sculptures from aspen and other woods. I design books.

Choosing to be an artist in the late sixties was the easy part. I had always taken great joy in making things since I was a small child. And once my older brother Michael had taken me, in my teens, to the Museum of Modern Art I knew that painting and sculpture was something of great value to me. One summer I even got a job in the mailroom of that museum. It gave me the pleasure of seeing Klee, Picasso, Braque, Schwitters, et al. repeatedly and easily. I knew the hidden staircases of the museum. I lunched on the bench in the room where Guernica hung. It was in their garden’s evening concerts that I expanded my view of art while listening to Muddy Waters play the blues. Between high school and college, I was in England for a year and visited their museums, as well as other big-name institutions in Europe including the Prado and the Louvre. I began painting in earnest during my undergraduate years at Yale. I graduated in 1970, in the haze of late sixties hippie culture, with no clear idea of what I should be doing next. I did not feel like staying in the educational incubator. Armed with only my notebooks, I moved to Maui where a classmate had taken a house with his high-school surf buddies. We surfed west Maui breaks, and even Kahului harbor. I drew in my notebooks, and took photos. I wandered the US a bit. I liked what I saw in Colorado and ended up in a small mining town in western Colorado. I had learned graphic production in New Haven as designer of the Yale Literary Magazine. And so I began my design practice in the new restaurants of Steamboat doing branding, signage and menus. I also returned to oil painting. I eventually moved to Denver and have been there ever since. I have experienced the pleasures of oil painting and the evolution of what I choose to paint. Art is a primary value in my life. I have had only a few paycheck jobs in my life, mostly in the seventies. The most amusing would be my work as a sculptor of Denver’s famous Casa Bonita Restaurant (recently renovated by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. http://tinyurl.com/casaboak). Living the entrepreneurial life has allowed me to continue to paint and to make sculptures.

I have received many commissions over the years, from private individuals, public institutions and art consultants. I continue to paint non-commissioned works, which I then offer and sell to my collectors.
I have created sculptural and built-in glyph art for the Colorado Welcome Centers in bronze, aluminum, corten steel, slate and glass. I made very large torch-cut Corten dinosaur glyphs for the Welcome center in Dinosaur, Colorado.

An artist’s work evolves. Mine has been through these phases. A) Early photo-based ; B) Drawing-based larger canvases using free-hand airbrush with acrylics, often dreamlike in western desert and mountain landscapes; C) Oil paintings derived from my hiking-notebook colored-pencil drawings. D) Cubist-derived oil paintings on irregularly-shaped panels, mostly images of deco movie theaters; E) photo-derived oils on irregular panels, with images I took of the structural steel of the Denver Art Museum’s Liebeskind-designed Hamilton Building while the building was in construction; F) photo-based oil on linen paintings derived from motion-blurred images of New York, Tokyo and Osaka. F) Wall sculptures, over the decades, that are made from airbrushed wood and odd metal found-objects. G) Digital art, built from photos, with the addition of natural-media brush work in the program Procreate.

My current blurred paintings are made from photos that utilize my walking stride to make an overall “brush-stroke” on the camera’s CCD image sensor. I then take this blurred image, and make my own modifications in Photoshop. This becomes, in renaissance tech talk, my “cartoon.” I print it out full-sized and transfer some of its line and form with pencil and chalk onto my linen “canvas.” Then I begin the long process of translating the complex pattern of lines into the luminous illusion of the final painting.

My latest painting is “Dotonbori,” an image of the Doton canal and bridge in Osaka, just across the river from the “Gliko Man,” a cultural landmark of Osaka:
Dotonbori

https://shop.boakart.com
https:// boakart.com

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Our museums are excellent. I like hiking along the Platte River Greenway.
I hike a lot. But that is not Denver.
I like the park to the east of our house: we enjoy the diverse water fowl, the turtles and the muskrats.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My parents, some of their friends, numerous good teachers and professors during my education at my public school, my private high school (The Hotchkiss School) and my college (Yale.)

Website: https://boakart.com and https://shop.boakart.com

Instagram: instagram.com/johnboak

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/john-boak

Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnboak

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boakart