Ken Boe is an experimental painter, poet, and playwright who has lived in Bisbee Arizona since last fall when he bought a home here with ample buildings to ply his multiple techniques for making art. He grew up in Evanston Illinois, adjacent to Chicago, where he attended the School of the Art Institute Of Chicago, and other Illinois Universities, including SIUC where he studied with the philosopher of metaphor Mark Johnson, painters Robert Paulson, Jed Jackson, and Ed Shay, poets Rodney Jones and Lucia Perillo, and playwrights David Rush and Jean Stawarz. Much of his formative creative development is rooted in the incredible creative resources of the Evanston Public school system, growing up around Northwestern University, and summers spent in the Minnesota countryside.

Ken has exhibited in many galleries and other venues around the United States, has published and had his works performed, and has curated a number of visual art exhibits, from 1994's Text-Texture-Context in Southern Illinois, to Transcribed Natures this last May in Wichita Kansas. Paintings from The Teapot Series have previously exhibited in Southern California, Las Vegas, Denver, Wichita, Miami and Phoenix Arizona.

The Teapot series began when Ken decided to develop his scribble technique to oil and canvas; a methodology he developed in watercolor for small pieces he gave away for years in his travels. Wanting a simple trope to turn the scribbles into he decided on the teapot motif, noticing that many modern ceramic artists were making non-functional teapots as sculpture. Several dozen of the small teapot paintings were made while he lived at Miami Art Works, in Miami Arizona, over the last few years. Other techniques, such as drawing from the shadows of certain types of found objects, were brought into the mix. A few works using some of his other techniques will be added to the display, including works with the found objects stuck into them; encaustic paintings which use bee’s wax, tree saps, ground pigments, and collage materials; and works combining these ideas with a kind of plaster referred to as Gesso Grosso; and in some works painting with a whip (action printmaking.)

Ken Boe believes that we develop a textural literacy in appreciating contemporary art-meaning, meaning that the more we can learn about experimental and traditional materials the more we will appreciate the art work made with them. Materials have their own semiotics as much as clear cut representation does, whether a painting on a piece of burnt wood, or a painting of a piece of burnt wood, or the visual rhyme of both together. For this he continually pushes himself in many directions, and processes, identifying himslef as an experimental artist through and through.

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