EXHIBIT

The works assembled for this exhibition express, in several different ways, my commitment to the art of painting and my long-time practice as a Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhist. In the course of decades, I have felt no slightest conflict or contradiction in this dual commitment. Of course, my painting has been moved by a wide range of factors rooted in artistic principles, but my painting is also informed by a deep and continuing investment in spiritual/philosophical principles. Buddhism places a great emphasis on awareness and how we perceive, and yet there is also—certainly in Eastern art—a refusal to depart entirely from the laws of nature. That refusal is unmistakable in my own art, where allusions to landscape, even to figuration, are persistently discernible. In fact, I have wanted to evoke a sense of the spiritual and the unnamable without forsaking legibility.

The tantric Buddhism that informs my work is too complex and vast to reduce to simple explanation, but the essence of the Wisdom is that everything, our true nature, every phenomenon, inside and out, everything felt and experienced, is primordially pure, free, infinitely dimensional, mutable, and expressive, a continuously colorful display. Paradoxically, there is a great emphasis upon a grand simplicity where trusting, in faith and devotion, we accept and use whatever comes to us in our daily minutes that can sensually awaken us to an inherent truth we know to be somewhat beyond our reach in the moment.

Seekers in various arts and disciplines frequently bear witness to the way that color, a taste, the vibration of a sound, an unexpected confluence of impressions or sensual reminders can trigger a sense of liberty, blossoming, like fireworks in the sky, like an endless rippling on a moving river. These are felt by an artist operating within the tradition of Tantric Buddhism as opportunities for spiritual awakening which can yield—for the artist, for the viewer-- eruptions of emotion and a sense of the uncontrollable. The aspiration, clearly, is to transmit, in the action of the paint, in symbols and shapes and evocations of the natural world, what one writer calls “a spark of the eternal stream of life or consciousness.” To imagine all your neural networks firing incessantly is to have some notion of the spiritual vitalism informing my practice.

In thinking of these paintings as expressions of an energized medium, informed always by Buddhist principles, I have come to think of them as an “innerscape,” illuminated by an alertness to the external world and its wonders. Thus, I see in the paintings blossomings and unfoldings, marks that appear like exploding suns, flowers, nectar droplets, fertile vapors, bodies of water, mysteriously unified ornaments of the boundaryless landscape of our inner and outer lives, alluding to something akin to a symphonic score of freely vibrating notes.

An artist-friend, looking at a number of the recent paintings in my New York City studio, remarked that they seemed like operatic images of “Being,” which I quite liked. Regarded in such terms, each painting is a different stage on the way to some alchemy, some impending series of sensations and becomings that remind us of our deepest nature, our devotional capacities, our highest aspirational selves.

Of course, when I am at work on the paintings, my attention is focused in another way. Each canvas appears raw, naked, a fertile ground. I spill layers of pigmented water and medium from tin cans, dragging substance across the surface with unconventional tools and brushes. I paint flat, resting the room size canvases on milk crates. I have no initial image in mind of the blossoming forms that will come from the process of spilling and mixing and the dance of spontaneous gestures. When I start a painting, there is no top or bottom: I walk around the canvas, allowing the forms and colors to develop freely.

I am thus unencumbered by the concepts and beliefs that seed my work, secure in the prospect that those concepts and beliefs will nonetheless inform and underscore my process, naturally, inevitably. I want nothing to diminish the freshness of my engagement with painting, the practice of my life, my commitment to discovering the world that is in vital ways invisible and yet ever present, ALWAYS THERE. The artist is limited and imperfect, the struggle to reach far enough always humbling, the journey is a gift and welcome burden.



Boyers' paintings of metaphysical landscapes and figurative elements suggest a deep dive into a practice of colorfully portraying what he suggests are the "unified ornaments of the boundaryless landscapes of our lives, a portrayed symphonic score of infinitely unfolding notes."

Lowell Boyers is an American painter who works with acrylic paints, resins and inks on canvas, seamlessly blending figurative and abstract imagery. He was an award-winning artist at RISD, received his MFA from Yale University, and his work has been the subject of gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide, including in Cologne, London, Abu Dhabi, India, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas. He lives and works in New York City.

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