Take in brand new exhibitions at The Art Studio, Inc. on the first Saturday of each month! Join us Saturday October 3rd, 7-10pm for the opening reception of
“The Dust & The Damned”
by Justin Bossier
in the Main Gallery
Justin Bossier is a Texas-based artist and award-winning tattoo artist from Bridge City, Texas. He studied drawing and printmaking at Lamar University, pursuing a dual focus in both disciplines before leaving near the completion of his BFA to begin a tattoo apprenticeship under Randall “Flipper” Doolittle at Flipper’s Skin Flix in Bridge City.
For nearly fifteen years, tattooing has been Bossier’s primary creative practice, eventually leading him to open Arrowhead Tattoo in Port Neches, Texas. After years spent working within the precision, planning, and permanence required by tattooing, he returned seriously to painting as a way of making work that was entirely his own.
Bossier works primarily in mixed media, using house paint, spray paint, acrylic, ink, pastel, paint markers, found imagery, and whatever other materials serve the piece. His paintings are intentionally loose, layered, weathered, and imperfect, drawing visually from graffiti, aging billboards, torn posters, and walls that have been repeatedly painted over and stripped away.
Much of his recent work draws from Texas, the American West, working people, and the imagery of a simpler and rougher way of living. Western imagery became increasingly personal to Bossier later in life, connecting him to home and to the family members who surrounded him with that imagery growing up.
Bossier lives and works in Southeast Texas, where he continues to paint and tattoo at Arrowhead Tattoo.
Artist Statement:
My paintings are a place where I don’t have to stay inside the lines.
After nearly fifteen years of tattooing, I’ve spent most of my working life making art for other people. Tattooing requires precision, planning and control. Painting gives me the opposite. I work quickly and loosely, using spray paint, house paint, ink, pastel, acrylic, markers, found imagery, or whatever else happens to be within reach. I like to mess up a blank canvas before I become too precious with it. Once it’s dirty, marked up and imperfect, I can stop worrying about making something beautiful and start making something honest.
Most paintings begin with music rather than an image. I listen to songwriters like Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Blaze Foley, George Jones, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings and allow the music to take me somewhere emotionally. Often, I intentionally revisit sadness, grief, anger and memories that aren’t as easy to live with in everyday life. Painting gives me somewhere to put those things. Over the course of several days with a piece, I can sit with a feeling, work through it and eventually leave some of it on the canvas.
Visually, I’ve been strongly influenced by the work of Terry Urban and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I was introduced to Urban’s work through a friend while I was already experimenting with Western imagery and a loose, expressive approach to painting. I later saw his work in person and had the opportunity to meet him and hear him talk about his process. I immediately connected with the way he approached painting, particularly the role music, intuition, layering, words and Western imagery played in his work. Basquiat’s rawness, color and immediacy have also been influential, particularly his ability to let marks remain loose, expressive and unapologetically imperfect.
I’m drawn to people who look like they’ve already been through something. The tired ones. The overlooked ones. The people doing the work behind the person who gets put on the billboard. A rodeo clown risks his body so the cowboy can walk away. A boxer sacrifices flesh for someone else’s entertainment. The occupations in my paintings aren’t necessarily portraits of what these people actually do. They’re often metaphors for how I see them: fighters, servants, survivors, people who keep showing up.
I grew up around people like that. My parents and grandparents taught me the dignity of working for what you have, even when what you have isn’t much. There’s something I admire about making something with your hands, earning what belongs to you, and living without needing recognition for it. I don’t necessarily see myself as one of those people. In many ways, I envy them. But they shaped the way I understand strength.
The worn surfaces of my paintings come from a visual language I’ve been attracted to for years: graffiti, weathered walls, old billboards, torn posters and layers of things that have been painted over, ripped away and painted over again. I like evidence that something existed before what you’re seeing now. I don’t want the surface to feel untouched. I want it to have lived a little.
The Dust & The Damned will consist primarily of medium- to large-scale mixed-media paintings, along with a smaller selection of linocut work. The exhibition brings these ideas together through the imagery of Texas, the American West and the people who exist somewhere outside the spotlight. The work includes tired workers, fighters, rodeo figures and other worn characters, as well as a series reimagining the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse through the visual language of the American West.
“The damned” aren’t necessarily damned in a biblical sense. Some are socially damned, relegated to the shadows and the soft underbelly of what keeps the world moving. And the dust is where all of us eventually end up. People disappear, memories fade, and even the people who shaped us can slowly become fragments of stories.
These paintings are my attempt to hold onto some of those fragments.
More than anything, the work is about giving recognition to those who are rarely recognized. I don’t want the viewer to pity these people. I want them to stop for a moment, look at the person who’s worn the hell out, and see something worth admiring.
