The Roy Boyd Gallery in Chicago, of which Boyd and his wife Ann are co-directors, specializes in abstract art, and has been doing so since 1972. For more than 20 years, they apparently did not show much interest in representational art, much less art portraying the human figure.
Then one day in 1994, a friend of Ann’s — Ilana Vardy, an organizer of the Chicago International Art Exhibition — came in with a painting of a nude male figure. And the Boyds fell in love.
The figures were “in the middle of the canvas, as they would be in a photograph,” with no visible background, the paint applied “thick and heavy” and mainly in dark colors, and with expressionless faces, but “the body language was strong,” said Ann Boyd in a telephone interview on July 15. “They were glorious and beautiful.”
That was how the Boyds became acquainted with the work of former Milwaukeean Daniel Bodner. The Boyd Gallery exhibited Bodner’s paintings the following year, and they have been doing so ever since.
Moreover, said Ann, the Boyds seem to be as taken with Bodner as a person as much as with him as an artist. “He has such a lovely presence,” with “people skills” that are “warm and responsive, just like his work is… It’s just one of those ideal situations.”
And it remains ideal even as Bodner’s work has changed radically. Now he paints cityscapes, primarily of New York City; and he has clothed people on the streets, with the whole looking slightly out-of-focus, or like a photograph that is decaying.
Yet Ann Boyd likes these just as much. “You can feel the rain-slicked pavements, see the perspective, feel the fog… they’re just really exquisite,” she said. The gallery is planning to exhibit some of these works in 2010, she said.
Psychology at first
The human warmth of Bodner’s work is not purely a matter of technique. As Bodner explained in a telephone interview on July 14, he originally was a psychology major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bodner, son of Mickie and Gerry Bodner of Mequon, “drew a lot as a child” growing up in Fox Point, but didn’t think he would become a professional artist, he said.
Instead, “I think I was always a sensitive kid who understood people well,” and that made him want to study psychology. He also liked to read and developed an interest in philosophy.
He may have displayed some of his people skills in his B’nai B’rith Youth Organization chapter, as well. He was president for one year, and ran the Wisconsin regional BBYO convention when he was a high school junior.
But when he finally went to UW and took the psychology courses, “I was feeling disillusioned. It was not as interesting as I thought it would be.”
He confided in his maternal grandmother, Sarah Zitron; and she, knowing that he liked to draw, suggested that he take some art classes. So he did, and “I got very good reactions from all the professors.”
But two experiences made him change careers. First was a class in oil painting. Second, he worked at the Madison Art Center, where he helped mount an exhibition by California-based painter-sculptor-printmaker Nathan Oliveira (born 1928), who “painted figures in abstract space.” His work, to Bodner, “had an existential feel, if you can say that about art.”
“The two things just clicked,” he said. “I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
After graduating in 1985, Bodner studied at The Art Students’ League in New York City. Then in 1988, he decided to go to Berlin, “to the astonishment of my parents.” A group of young German painters was doing work with the human figure that Bodner found interesting.
“I wanted to go reinvent myself as an artist, and drink the water of whatever was going on there,” he said.
In the course of his first European sojourn, he also discovered Amsterdam. After a return to New York that lasted a year-and-a-half, he decided to return to Berlin, but on the way to stop in Amsterdam for a few months.
“I never left” the Dutch city, he said. “Amsterdam is a very lovely place, with a lot of water around… I like the people. It is free and open. And it is possible to live and be an artist there… without having to work a day job all the time.”
Light and metaphor
Today, he divides his time between Amsterdam, where he still has an apartment, New York City, and Provincetown, Mass., where he spends summers.
For some 20 years, Bodner painted the figure against an abstract background, in the style that so attracted the Boyds. Then in 2005, he spent a year in New York City.
As he told the online magazine Neoteric Art (in an article that can be accessed through Bodner’s Web site), revisiting that city “forced me to no longer be on the outside in an abstract atmosphere…. I began to look at the city and what was familiar about it. Then my painting became an exploration of more realistic space than I had been used to. It was as though the figure I’d been painting turned and saw a more real space and became part of the greater picture.”
Today, he takes photographs of various urban scenes, but doesn’t just paint the photos in the way some photo-realist painters do. “I flip them around, delete cars and lampposts, as I see fit, to serve the composition,” he said in the telephone interview.
And he deliberately makes the photos look either out-of-focus or decaying, partly to emphasize how light works in photographs to define or obliterate objects, but also as “visual metaphors for the human experience.”
When this writer suggested that this idea recalls a pre-abstract expressionist view of what art is about, Bodner replied, “One could call it old-fashioned. I would refer to it as timeless. We’re all still human. We all wonder what will happen next.”
Bodner said he sells his works primarily to private collectors, though museums have bought some. Two of his paintings are being rented by the HBO cable television series “In Treatment,” where they are prominently placed on the walls of the psychiatrist protagonist’s office; and “I get calls all the time” from people who see them on the show.
The current economic crisis naturally is affecting the art world, and “there seems to be a slump in sales,” he said. However, “I’m knocking on wood, but it seems to be going well with me.”
At a show at the Allen Sheppard Gallery in New York earlier this year, “We sold almost everything,” and he reported that exhibits running currently in Berlin and Amsterdam are selling some of his work. So, “I’m holding my breath,” he said.
Formerly op-ed editor, Leon Cohen has written for The Chronicle for more than 25 years.
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