Ian Boyden

Paintings & Books

Showing July 5 - August 2, 2008

Davidson Contemporary is proud to release the newest Crab Quill Press publication, Habitations. This unique artist book of original paintings represents a collaboration of the artist Ian Boyden and the poet Sam Hamill (founding editor of Copper Canyon Press and Poets Against War). The artist sees this work as a major extension of ideas central to the Northwest School. The pigments used in the paintings contain fossilized whale ear bone, fossilized shark tooth, fossilized cave bear tooth, cuttlefish ink, freshwater pearl, opal, loess, basalt, granite, lava, and petrified wood. The words and images are deeply grounded in our region on multiple levels.

Ian Boyden lives and works in Walla Walla, Washington. For nine years, he served as the director of the Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, and is the founder and owner of Crab Quill Press, which is devoted to uniting calligraphy, poetry, printing, and translation. Boyden has studied calligraphy since he was a child and followed this passion through a master's degree at Yale University in Asian Art History.

Habitations, 2007-08

Sequence of 13 paintings

$16,000 as complete set framed
$14,000 as complete set unframed

thumbnail Habitations, 2007-08
Artist book of 18 paintings.
Poem by Sam Hamill. Maple cover.
11 unique editions.
31 x 11 x 1 inches.
$12,000

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Additional Work Available

Ian Boyden's works on paper explore natural and metaphysical liminal spaces, horizons, where the known and the unknown come together. Boyden challenges formal notions of vertical and horizontal, black and white, earth and sky. Using natural archetypal forms such as the line, the circle, trees and water, the artist considers the parallels, pairs and dualities that are found in nature. In grinding his own pigments, cochineal, hematite, lapis lazuli, logwood, malachite, titanium and azurite, the artist forms an intimate relationship with the materials. To effectively use these organic substances Boyden must know their properties fully. At the same time, he must allow for the unexpected and the spontaneous when these materials react with each other and the paper. For this artist, experimentation is a critical part of the process.

• Please contact the Contemporary Print & Drawing Center for works below.