Daniel C. Boyer
“We Support Each Other” – coloured pencils and watercolour
New York, USA
“My work is primarily influenced by surrealism and various methods developed by the surrealists. I start at many points but I think the end point is always a horizon over which lie more imaginative possibilities. My artwork reflects nightmare and reverie and plays over a wide range of political history, from that of the Reformation to the Soviet Union and beyond. I have painted with gouache diluted with Coca-Cola and Diet Coke and invented aspiratage, a method of making impressions in the pile of carpeting with a vacuum cleaner. I’m attracted by the mysteriously dark tinting and sedimenting. I am influenced by the characters from politics and political history, whether their legacy is positive or negative. My Artwork can be not only a reflection of fantasy and humor, but also can represent misery and even horror when these characters are confronted by compromise and the effects of accommodation to dictatorship.”
Born in 1971 in Hancock, Michigan, Daniel C. Boyer spent his childhood in nearby Houghton, with the exception of 1981-82, when the family lived in London, Ontario, Canada. In 1987, after chancing upon Andre Breton’s “Manifestoes of Surrealism” in a college library, he made his first automatic drawings and paintings. He would join the Surrealist Movement in the United States in 1992. In 1994 he moved to Waltham, Massachusetts; the same year his book “The Octopus Frets: political poems” (for which he also did the frontispiece) was published. He graduated in 1997 from Curry College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics and History, after which he studied at Harvard University. He then moved to Concord, New Hampshire. In 1998 he moved briefly to Medford, Massachusetts before returning to Concord; this same year he made his first entopic graphomanias. In 2001 he returned to Houghton. In 2003 his artist’s book “The Tailgating Spinster” was published by Fiji Island Mermaid Press. In 2005 he was named an Academical Knight of Verbano of the Ordine Accademio Internazionale “Greci-Marino”. In 2008 his book “The Peloponnesian Snows,” perhaps the first-ever book published in the webdings font, was released; he also designed the cover. Later that year he designed the dust cover of his exclusively large-print book “What Snow Disrupts,” published by Idealist Press International, Ltd. He is an honourary alumnus of The Johns Hopkins University. In 2012 he moved to New York City.
For more information about the artist, check out: www.newyorkboyerfoundation.tk/
