A survey of works from 1985 to 2022
Ronald Boaks
Niagara artist Ronald Boaks was born in Newmarket, Ontario. He works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, and collage, but he is best known for his vivid expressive abstract paintings in which he aims to reflect beauty, balance, desire and humor.
“There are many dualities in my life: I am both a Romantic and a Modernist, my visual interests include the two and three dimensional, I work with black and white as well as with vibrant colour and I delight in both abstraction and realism.
My passion for making art spans 60 years. This show includes works from 1985 to the present. The earliest works are landscapes; close-up representations of the detailed colour and texture of rock. They evolved into ideal landscapes and morphed into Modernist ‘acts of painting’. Then my more Romantic inclinations brought in flowers or the female form in collage. These meanderings between my Modernist and Romantic dualities have led me to my most recent works In which I have juxtaposed two seemingly different images. I enjoy the frisson when discovering the relationship between a realistic image and an abstract composition.
If I had to reduce my approach to art making to one sentence, it would be “I love the simple complexity of putting together the many elements of interest from my life.” ~Ronald Boaks, 2022
