JAVA Nov 19

BRIAN BONER
AMERICAN PLAYGROUND
By Jenna Duncan
“I grew up in a very rural part of America, you know,
the Midwest,” painter Brian Boner says. “When you
have kids, you have this baseline of, ‘Well, this is
how I grew up, maybe this is how my kids will grow
up.’ But my kids are growing up in a city in the desert,
whereas I grew up in a small town in the forest.”
Boner’s new collection of paintings, American
Playground, combines contemporary images with
some family photos, and also images symbolic of his
childhood and the new world he is experiencing as a
father, with his two sons.
Boner grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota, near the
Black Hills, a town he describes as “small, but not
horribly small.” He went to college in Minnesota and
Montana (got a bachelor’s in painting and drawing),
and he says after too many days of 60-below winters,
he had to move on to someplace warmer.
But critical geography is not the only big difference
between Boner’s childhood and that of his sons.
After college, Boner and some friends moved to
Tempe. He used to visit his grandparents there
with his family in the winters, so he was familiar
with the terrain. Once he started getting into the art
scene, he moved downtown.
“I met Greg [Esser] and Cindy [Dash]. They were renovating
a house on 6th Street,” he says. “My studio
was a garage that you could open from both ends.”
While living in the Roosevelt arts district, Boner met
his wife-to-be, artist Christina Ramirez, at the Long
House. Boner worked for Phoenix Art Group about
two years and became further connected with local
artists. Then, he supported himself solely from the
sales of his paintings.
“I’d pick up the odd job installing things, for Scottsdale
Museum of Contemporary Art or various galleries.
Or I’d pick up a job teaching art for a couple of
days.” But when the economy turned sour, he found
himself in the position of needing a day job again.
Through a friend, he signed on with Art Solutions,
fine art installers. He’s been with the company more
than 10 years and says he likes the work and the
flexibility. He was able to take six months to paint
full-time in order to prepare for this show.
Some paintings are still lifes – a handful of alphabet
magnets, an image of a Jackelope – while others
combine imagery taken from a variety of sources in a
sort of collage of new meaning. One painting shows
his youngest son, Elias, standing before an American
bison. The bison appears to be about to drink water
from a blue plastic kiddy pool. In the background is
the white house his father grew up in, and a barn
wall painted with white and red stripes, emblematic
of the American flag.
Another painting shows a collection of antique school
desks that seem to drip with electric colors (some
hidden purples, corners of green) as if emerging from
a dream of nostalgia. Boner says these desks were
discovered in the attic of his family’s ranch in South
Dakota. They came from the old schoolhouse that
18 JAVA
MAGAZINE