IAN BOYDEN_______________________________________________________

          

 

Our Winter 2010 featured artist, Ian Boyden, is a bookmaker and painter whose deep belief in the link between materiality and meaning informs his many creative projects. In his paintings—ten of which appear on the issue’s front and back covers and within its pages—he uses handmade pigments derived from the unlikeliest sources—an ancient meteorite, say, or an Eastern Washington vineyard—to make tangible the metaphysical qualities of the place or element itself. In this interview with The Georgia Review, the energetic and amiable Boyden talks about—among other things—his childhood lessons in calligraphy, his nearly lifelong obsession with Asian culture, and his willingness to exploit (and, if necessary, sacrifice) household appliances in the name of art.

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You grew up in the Pacific Northwest but have spent much of your life studying the art and culture of China. In what ways have these two very different (but in some ways culturally and physically connected) spaces influenced and figured into your art-making?

I grew up in an estuary on the Oregon coast, a really magical place. It was shadowed to the north by a huge headland; there were stands of old growth trees and wide-open meadows, this little river where I loved to fish, brutal winter storms, and the constant presence of the Pacific Ocean. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and I was the only kid around for miles, so I wandered through this environment and spent a lot of time in my own head—my own form of meditation. As a child, I encountered quite a bit of Asian culture, which has had a considerable influence on the Pacific Northwest, especially on artists like Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Hilda Morris. I was exposed to their work at a young age. In our own house, we had this giant scroll of Bodhidharma (a fifth-century monk who introduced Zen to China) that haunted one corner.

 

 

 Boyden in his studio

We had a close family friend who became a monk down at the San Francisco Zen Center; we would go visit him from time to time, and I thought the world of him. I went to various exhibitions of Chinese art, the most memorable being a gathering of Chinese calligraphy called “Traces of the Brush” that I think was at Berkeley. I remember that exhibition clearly. I was naturally drawn to East Asian art; it really spoke to me in that the poetry, painting, and calligraphy of China integrated seamlessly with the place where I grew up. It addressed so many things that I knew but had never given voice to, especially ways of relating to the environment. In Chinese art, there is a remarkable emotional integration with the environment. Nostalgia, silence, reverence, compassion, delight. . . . The way we occupy a place shapes our personalities in magnificent ways. Opening myself and allowing my environment to inhabit me has been richly rewarding. My art is a direct result of all this.
        When I went to college this funny thing happened. I wanted to become an archaeologist. I was totally infatuated with Maya culture and thought that’s what I would study. French was a prerequisite to enter the anthropology department. Instead of getting into a French class, however, I was assigned Chinese. I have no idea how that happened. I was sitting there outside the student union, kind of irritated and wondering what to do, when I thought, Maybe this is a sign. Maybe I should go meet the Chinese professor. So I did. In the space of about twenty minutes I forgot about French and anthropology, and within a year I found myself living in China. I had a strange feeling that I was returning to someplace very familiar. I had been interested in calligraphy as a child, and in China I encountered this extraordinary calligraphic tradition. So I started to study, learning how to use a brush and becoming familiar with ink and paper. For the next ten years I devoted myself to the study of Chinese culture and the arts.

How did your interest in calligraphy affect your development as a scholar and a practicing artist? And can you talk about the differences between Chinese and Western calligraphy?

 

image copyright Crab Quill Press, 2004

  

I am really lucky. My first teacher was an artist named Margot Voorhies Thompson. She herself had been a student of Lloyd Reynolds, who was a calligrapher and professor at Reed College deeply involved in the revival of italic lettering. So, when Margot taught me to write when I was five, we started with Carolingian minuscule script, or something like that. She wanted our handwriting to reflect the history of Western calligraphy. We made nibbed pens out of reeds and quills. She really made the art of written forms come alive, introducing us to Western calligraphers like Friederich Neugebauer, Rudolf Koch, Eric Gill, and others. I credit Margot in large part for my interest in lines and ink. But I don't really have the patience to be a Western calligrapher. Maybe patience isn’t the right word. I’m really interested in practices that shed light on the inner mind, and Chinese calligraphy does a marvelous job of that. It percolates the void! What Western calligraphy did was get me interested in books and the arts of the books, but I couldn’t see myself in the actual practice. Chinese calligraphy got me interested in the visceral interaction between ink and paper. Unlike Western calligraphy (which generally uses a hard-nibbed pen), Chinese calligraphy uses a brush. The Chinese brush is extremely versatile, and each one has its own personality. With a little practice, you can make a great variety of lines. The brush reads every motion of your body, down to your heartbeat. The result is that when you look at “brushed” writing, you can see a remarkable amount of the writer’s spirit, to the extent that it can be viewed as a biometric. In addition, time becomes very fluid for me when I look at Chinese calligraphy.

So you believe the instrument itself contributes to meaning?

Brushes and pens all have tremendous personalities. I make many of my own. Several years ago I was sitting by a lake when an egret feather fell out of the sky and landed right next to me. The feather was pure white. I made a brush out of it that I still use, and while the quill remains white, all the feathery parts are black. More recently, I found a porcupine that had been hit on the road. So I made a brush from its guard hairs. I like these brushes to tell stories. I suppose that this informed some of the pieces called “Alchemical Quill” that you chose to include in the portfolio (“Alchemical Quill, No. 9” and “Alchemical Quill, No. 13”). These are collaborative paintings that I made with my friend Tim Ely. Among many other things, we are united in our love of brushes, pens, and other drafting tools. Except that Tim is way more obsessive about these things. He really knows how to operate an astounding number of drafting tools. One day he came to work at my studio and he brought with him a giant satchel. Grinning, he opened it up and pulled out dividers and compasses and various technical pens and jar after jar of his inks. I was overwhelmed with this feeling that maybe I was being visited by the satchel and its contents, and that it/they had brought Tim along as some sort of sidekick. One of the things that Tim is known for is for having made up his own language (he calls it Cribriform), and it is wonderfully alien and mysterious and otherworldly. So I posed the question to Tim of whether he ever felt like Cribriform might actually be the language of his pens and drafting tools, and that he himself was actually their tool. The conversation was really Borgesian, and by the end of it, we had devised these paintings in which I made these large quill forms and he filled them with Cribriform.

You pursued art history in college and graduate school—how did you make the transition from studying art to making it?

That’s a complicated one. I grew up in a family of artists. My dad, Frank Boyden, is a potter, sculptor, and printmaker. And my mom, Jane Boyden, is a musician. So I tried very hard to be something different. I didn’t get very far, although it felt dramatic: I decided to become an art historian. But I was always writing and making drawings and things like that. In 1996, my dad read one of my poems. He had just met an amazing bookmaker named Kathy Kuehn (proprietor of Salient Seedling Press), who had asked him if he would like to make an artist’s book with her. He asked if he could use my poem. I said sure, and a few months later I found myself engaged in this epiphanic conversation with Kathy and my dad about making books. I was in graduate school at the time, and I was surprised by how my conversations with Kathy were much more interesting than any I was having in grad school. Something snapped. I remember the moment very clearly. I was sitting outside one evening watching a sky of bats flying around a light and eating insects. But they were doing so much more than just eating insects. Their flight was a dance; it was a form of aerial calligraphy, a symphony of echoes. Suddenly, something shifted dramatically in my heart, and I realized that I was doing everything but what I really wanted to do, which was to make art and write. I left grad school and went to work for Kathy. I then started Crab Quill Press and began to make artist books. The transition was awkward at first, especially because I felt I had let a lot of people down. At the same time, I began to make paintings and drawings, and those first pieces explored the relationship of insects and calligraphy.

So how did you come to use only handmade pigments in your paintings, and how does using such unusual—and unpredictable—materials affect the work you produce, your project to translate the metaphysical into the physical?

In 1996, I found this thirteenth-century Chinese ink recipe while studying in the rare book room of the Suzhou University Library. It called for all these exotic materials such as the musk gland of a deer, ground pearl, cinnabar, sandalwood oil, and extract from hibiscus root. It also called for animal glue and pine soot, which is how I knew it was an ink. Pine soot is basically amorphous carbon (with a few aromatics and other elements) and is derived by burning the wood of a pine tree. Amorphous carbon has been the primary pigment used to make Chinese inks. To get it to bind to paper you need to have a binder. Typically, this has been some form of animal glue. I coerced my friend Wang Xuelei into making this ink with me. You would think that we would have gathered the ingredients in an art supply store, but instead, we found all of the ingredients (including the pine soot) in a Chinese apothecary shop. The recipe wasn’t precise; in fact, there were no directions at all or really any quantities. So we winged it and decided to make it in his mother’s rice cooker. Fortunately, his parents were living elsewhere at the time. We made this ink that had the consistency of a cottage cheese that might be consumed by some hideous demon, and we made some paintings with it. It was a disaster on one level, but also so intoxicating that we accidentally left the rice cooker turned on. By the next day, or whenever we found it, the rice cooker was completely trashed.
        I forgot about this experience for a few years until I started to study letterpress printing and began to experiment with making my own inks. I thought back on that original recipe. I became increasingly intrigued by the exotic ingredients, not so much for their physical qualities, but because my knowledge of their presence had a profound effect on my imagination. They called for a new form of observation. Ultimately, these began to determine the subjects of my painting. Historically, the search for pigments, for inks and paints, has been a search for color. My own search has been rather different—instead of seeking color, I look for pigments that tell stories that actively inhabit the imagination. These pigments become a means for gathering and a key to interpretation. Examples of materials I’ve used include meteorite dust, freshwater pearls, fossilized shark teeth, fossilized whale ear bones, and a wide variety of minerals, stones, and soils from specific geographical locations.
        Prior to painting, I spend time studying each of these materials, allowing their stories and characteristics to take root in my imagination. I pay close attention to their physical structures, how they formed, what their function is or may have been, how they have been used by other people and cultures, what they reveal about distant places and events. Once I have internalized these things, I begin to make paints with the materials and to develop painting techniques and compositions specific to each material. In so doing, I begin a dialogue and collaboration with the material itself. The act of painting becomes akin to translation, to revealing the image-voice of the other.

Is there one image in the Georgia Review portfolio that you think really exemplifies this approach?

They all do. Each painting is what I had in me at the time I made it. It’s strange, but once I make a painting it becomes an entity of its own quite separate from me. The piece is hard to assess. I really love “Evergreen Vineyards: Stones Projected by the Bolts.” I shouldn’t have sold that piece. It’s from a series of pieces called “Echoes of Earth” that explores the wine concept of terroir. I live just outside of Walla Walla, Washington, which, over the past few decades, has become a celebrated wine region. A great wine is said to exhibit terroir; that is, it reflects a discrete set of geological, climatic, and cultural characteristics that make a given winemaking region unique. I’ve been really lucky to have been privy to many conversations with winemakers about what constitutes the terroir of eastern Washington. What I’ve come to love about this term is that it is unrelentingly philosophical. It isn’t just a wine term—it’s a call for a deliberate form of habitation and practice, for a meditative relationship to the earth and its cycles, for evocation rather than determination. Terroir is a form of translation—while it describes the land, it also calls forth the way the landscape is rendered by our imagination. And this is precisely what I’m trying to do with my own search for pigments.
        I decided to translate the landscape of Eastern Washington as illuminated by terroir. I collected stones and soils from many vineyards in the region, and I ground them up for pigments for paints. Next I took carbon derived from burned grapevines and made various inks. And, finally, I mixed these carbon inks with the wine itself. I then studied the geology of Eastern Washington to learn what stories these pigments contained. It was a dramatic story: one of catastrophic floods, of extraordinary volcanism, and of massive dust storms. And with that I began to paint. “Stones Projected by the Bolts” is one of those paintings.

What you’re describing is a very personal connection to your creative work, but you’ve done a lot of collaborating with other artists—particularly Timothy Ely, whom you mentioned earlier. Will you talk a little more about your work together?

Tim resides close to my heart. He’s both a great friend and an important teacher. I first met Tim when I started to make books in 1998. Several years later, I curated an exhibition of his art and wrote a book about him titled The Tables of Jupiter: The Graphic Work of Timothy C. Ely (Donald H. Sheehan Gallery, 2004). It’s a pretty far-out book, one in which you can really see me processing Max Ernst. Through that project Tim and I became good friends, and after we had finished it, we began to make collaborative paintings. I would make some marks on a piece of paper and send it to Tim. Back and forth and back and forth until we had amassed a small pile of paintings. We took these first paintings and bound them as a book titled Near to the Place Where They Should Meet (Crab Quill Press, 2005). Then in 2009, we got pretty serious about these things and made several more. In these paintings you can see a conversation of sorts traipsing over all manner of arcane subjects such as alchemy, Taoist talismans, particle physics, Zen, and Borges. I have written a few short bits about these pieces on my website.

What’s your next project?

I told you about my first experience making ink in China. For the past year I’ve turned my attention back to carbon and carbon inks. I really want to know more about the source materials of amorphous carbon and explore the possible stories of these sources. For instance, why is pine soot ink from a specific mountain the most celebrated? How does our relationship to carbon ink change when we know its source? To begin to explore these questions, this last year I turned my own stove into a carbon collecting device and gathered varieties from larch, pine, and fir. And I made several paintings with it, including “Breath Penetrated by Stars” (which appears on the back cover of issue). I’m also curious about the historical methods for collecting carbon. A few months ago, I wrote to a friend of mine in China about these interests. And, to my surprise and delight, I just received a wonderful invitation to return to China in 2011 to be a visiting artist/researcher at Suzhou University. They want to support my research into the history of Chinese ink making, specifically the production of carbon inks. In addition, this invitation includes an offer to exhibit my work at the Fine Art Museum at the university. The invitation came out of the blue, and it’s for an entire year. I’m very hopeful that I can do this and have the opportunity to take my family to China.

                                                                                                                         M.W.