Fine Art Auctions

Boam arrived in Tas 1963 for a position with New Town High School and two years later commenced teaching at the Art School. As a highly educated teacher as well as active as a critic, reviewer and through public lectures, he provided a valuable influence in Tasmanian art over 55 years.
He demonstrated a pictorial language that was a process of deconstructive observation and pre-occupation with relationship between geometric and organic forms reflecting concerns with the tensions of order and chaos, the eye, the artist and the formalities of art.
However, the powerful canvases of pure abstraction from the 1970’s and 1980’s are a highlight in his career, as he identified powerful positive and negative spaces, the movement of colour, and sensory perceptions and responses. They represent a skilled pivotal high point culminating in dramatic works divorced from traditional references, a soaring elegance of mind and spirit.
His earliest quarry paintings of fractured landscapes leading to geometric abstract works follow fully through to the Bathurst Harbour series where abstraction is played on layers and grids as a landscape, exploring the complexities of light effects in prismatic forms.