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Leo Boeckl

Painting, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

Meaning is what the titles of my artworks reference. The art is not about the painterly style. That was for the 20th century. Style is simply the vocabulary utilized to express the intended meaning. Never the message itself.

The meaning of my artworks comes from my day job and working in BigTech. The relevance for specific technologies is very short. Most maybe a year at the most before that technology is built onto and becomes something else. The relevance however is entirely a different story. The impact of technology is the grit in the oyster which shapes everything humanity knows from culture, social structures all the way to worldview. All of this is held through the story of human history.

Having arrived at this unique perspective is the grit in my mind which constantly generates new ideas for compositions. Some of them I feel compelled to render in color and form. I guess when Socrates said "the unexamined life is not worth living" he was speaking for like minded people such as myself.

About the Artist

My day job for decades has been in building out solutions to make technologies both useful and safe in the world. The process and research required to successfully do this has kept me an outsider in an insider based world. A child of fresh off the boat immigrants pushed me ever outside mainstream. In building solutions the way I had over my career in BigTech sealed my position of outside looking in.             

Leo Boeckl website Contact the artist on Lboeckl.com Leo Boeckl website Leo Boeckl's artworks on Deviant Art Leo Boeckl website Leo Boeckl's works on Instagram

Featured Work

Photos

Taking back the image of our democratic nations flag from the right wing. Or response to Jan 6th insurrection. Photo given to my cousin for use in this painting. Though the painting is on cardboard it is mounted on traditional wooden stretcher bars.
Emotional response to the initial onset of the Pandemic. Cardboard is mounted on traditional wooden stretcher bars.
Took a photo of my mothers mid-century drawer unit and digitally overlaid/merged it with a photo of a tree on our property after a sleet storm. I mounted that image on cardboard with cardboard rectangles shown akimbo representing the loss of mom's mind. Mom was a tenured professor of art history at Univ of Nebraska. What she knew like the back of her hand she can't remember at all anymore. Painting won the mixed media category of the OverLeaArtsFest 2023.
When Rauschenberg created his artwork titled Rebus. He intentionally used boring muddy colors. For the same reason Picasso initially painted his cubist compositions with monochrome boring browns and greys. They were both saying their works were about the change in the style and should not be confused with the Expressionists and Abstract Expressionists in Rauschenberg's case schools that had preceded their artworks. The painting starts on the far upper left with a photo of the graveyard entrance to Maryland's own Clifford Still's resting place. It is ~10 miles form our home. I then recycled elements from Rauschenberg's Rebus piece adding images of the art and artists: Rauschenberg (in silhouette on skates), Johns and the other Pop artists. The painting is a bridge from style as meaning to content arriving on the right side of the image with images of my own artworks. There is far more meaning in the painting (environmental commentary along the bottom for instance) but I will cease the description there.
All of my best friends died young. My mentor Joe who brought me into BigTech suffered terribly from PTSD from his time serving in the Vietnam war. In upper left is an image of Michael Herr's famous book dispatches. Next to it is a Huey. Joe described the trauma of being inserted and picked up using the Hueys under fire. To the right is the top fret of an electric guitar. Music was Al's emotional being. It may have killed him. The bottom right are 2 repeated images from Sofie's choice. I was told by Bob's wife of having to make that same choice in America. Left of that is my college roommate Arnie's image. After partying all night he would rise at 5am to say his prayers. He would jot Springsteen'esque lyrics when the ideas struck. He was the kindest human being I have ever met. He left us a year after graduation. The image from the wizard at the front door of the Emerald city with the Huey next to it was from the person who taught me more about life than any other person I would ever meet. Dave married his love he met in Vietnam. He moved to Germany (see the image below the wizard) fearing America would not accept a mixed race family in the 1970s. He worked hard - for example building a Cadillac from spare parts in his garage. But he almost always had a smile on his face. I miss my best friends not simply because they were the witnesses to my life but because of the joy, knowledge and strength they brought me. They shaped my life in ways I could never fathom. The center of composition the are leaves and painted images of leaves under the plastic sheet. I doubt their stories will ever leave me.
The inverse square describes how gasses, light, planetary bodies, electricity and several other basic elements in the universe function. You can see why a planet orbits the way it does using the inverse square law. I think that history can be calculated the same way when viewed from the evolution human's development of technology. Specifically applied to Long Wave theory. Prior to primates existence the energy would be used as proxy (don't forget the most famous equation in the world an how Einstein demonstrated that energy and mass (technology) are interchangeable values. This would yields an acceleration rate equal to a Fibonacci sequence raised to the power of 10 (IMHO) traceable back to the Big Bang.

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