2000 Exhibition Year

Intimate Impressions:
Monotypes and Paintings by Jack Boul

11/28/2000 to 1/22/2001

Featured in the exhibition are many of Boul’s small evocative monotypes of landscapes, figures and interiors, as well as a number of paintings associated with the prints. Boul’s images of familiar surroundings, such as hazy days along the C & O Canal or cows in the pastures of rural Maryland, capture the timeless qualities of urban experience. Supported by the Evelyn Nef Fund, Intimate Impressions: Monotypes and Paintings by Jack Boul highlights the work of a mature artist whose life’s work and ongoing accomplishments merit special attention.

Jack Boul is both a painter and an etcher, but his most distinctive innovation is in the monotype printmaking technique. Monotype goes back to the seventeenth century, but had its greatest period of interest with Degas and the impressionists in Paris in the nineteenth century. The process begins with the artist drawing on a blank, often metal, surface with a thick viscous ink, and manipulating the ink to infinite gradations of tone. When the printmaker is content with his image, the plate is passed through a press, transferring the design from the metal to paper. Each painstaking process yields only one print—a true work of art.

Dr. Eric Denker, exhibition curator and the Corcoran’s Curator of Prints and Drawings, says of Jack Boul, “He approaches each subject with a simplicity that belies the sophistication of his painting and printing—the reduction to essentials, the captured essences of the visual world. The work can be comforting, or challenging, depending on the subject, but they are always beautifully composed.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Jack Boul has been living and working in the Washington area for more than 40 years and has a long history with the Corcoran. His work was featured in group exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1951, 1954, 1956 and 1958. Featured again in the 1994 exhibition Still Working: Underknown Artists of Age in America, Intimate Impressions is Boul’s first solo museum exhibition Washington. He has taught printmaking at the Smithsonian Institution, American University and at Montgomery College in Maryland. Boul is also one of the founders of the Washington Studio School, an art school located in Georgetown. He has had enormous influence over younger printmakers in the region, with many young artists coming to monotype under his mentoring.

Curator :: Eric Denker