Chuck Boyce: “Anecdotal Abstraction” at 6 Month Space

6Month Space is proud to present Anecdotal Abstraction, an exhibition of painting and collage by Chuck Boyce. Opening on Friday, July 22, 2016 from 7-9pm, the exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation. The exhibition will feature a selection of the artist’s playful and carefully layered compositions—painted between 2011 and the present—and a small group of collages.

Andre Masson declared that if one dropped a piece of string from a height onto a floor or table, the resulting pattern would always be both interesting and beautiful. And it works. Try it.
So: I start with a scribble, the piece of string. Sometimes it’s a casually drawn congregation of zigzags or complex closed curves, sometimes a randomly assembled group of lines from maps—shorelines, watersheds, elevation isobars. Any such more or less chance-generated lines can be Masson’s strings.

 
Then, I fiddle: fill in the spaces, add frills and furbelows—spirals and plumes, stripes and rashes—and see what happens. Sometimes what happens will resemble a figure or a landscape (anecdotal abstraction), or a pure abstraction will emerge.
In any case, I find I have a chance-created image (at least in part). Maybe about one in ten or twenty such drawings may lead me to a painting. Maybe some similar proportion of paintings will be any good. I take what I can get.

Boyce was born in St. Louis in 1943 and he lives and works in New York. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1969 and completed his graduate studies at Columbia University in 1979. His education led him to pursue a career in writing and poetry, which he maintained for many years. His most notable publications include his Dictionary of Furniture (Facts on File, 1985) and Shakespeare A to Z (Facts on File, 1990). At the turn of the century, Boyce began drawing extensively. In 2009, he switched to oil painting and has devoted himself to the visual arts ever since.
Boyce first exhibited his work in a group exhibition, 5 x 5 at Edward Thorp Gallery (2016, New York). He is a self-taught artist.
Anecdotal Abstraction is on view at 6Month Space, 251 E Houston St (between Norfolk and Suffolk St), through Saturday, August 13, 2016.The space is open on Wednesdays 7:00pm-9:00pm, Saturdays 1:00pm-6:00pm, and by appointment. For more information please email us at info@6monthspace.com.