Wayne Boucher

I was drowning. I was five. A sunny August day, sitting on a single rounded rock in midstream. Who put me there? I can't swim. Sliding down the green slime into a wonderment of dazzling light and greens watching the last gasp of bubbles. My eldest daughter once said she wanted to go home although she was home. In Nova Scotia, I live surrounded by woods. My painting practice for the last ten years has been about watery places. All I really want people to do is fall in and drown in the work. Perhaps, the need to find home. That's why I paint.

Since 1975 my painted work has dealt with surface tensions between figuration and abstraction, geometry, and organicism in play with large elemental fields of colour, or black and white. The paintings from (1997-2000) utilized a variety of international signaling codes; such as marine signal flags, ground to air signals, and Morse code . These spatial images portended to vast oceanic voyages, and dangerous crossings in a dialectical tension with the systemic pattern and codification of the signal props. The recent work of 2001-03 has also been about the surface and depths of watery and spatial places, but with the hint and the reemergence of the figurative, the anthropomorphic, and architectural intrusions into large elemental spaces.

Verte Noir
oil on canvas, 58 in x 46 in