Adam de Boer's life-size oil paintings of youthful indiscretion, set against the fantastical backdrop of student life in Isla Vista, will be featured in a solo exhibition at The Arts Fund Gallery from January 27 - March 10, 2006. The public is invited to the gallery, located on Yanonali Street at Santa Barbara Street, for an opening reception with the artist on January 27, from 5:30 - 7:30 PM. De Boer was the winner of one of The Arts Fund's 2005 Individual Artist Awards in the category of oil painting.

All is Well: Recent Paintings by Adam de Boer presents eight large canvasses and studies (many are 6' square) that comprise an anthropology of college life. De Boer combines contemporary social realism with the compositional and lighting techniques of Renaissance painters to produce provocative images richly peopled with casts of young faces that effectively convey the ambiguity inherent in the exhibition's title phrase. His subjects are participants in a visual narrative, theatrically lit and expressively contorted in melodramatic reaction to some activity or event, frequently some form of conflict. The studies offer insight into the artist's working method and confirm his technical proficiency; the work of a skilled draftsman underlies de Boer's paintings.

De Boer's artwork is a contrast to the conventional plein air landscapes that dominate the Santa Barbara art scene, though his work is just as much a product of locale. While the experience of college youth is not endemic to Santa Barbara, the volatile mix of newfound freedom, limited responsibility, and hedonistic spirits find particularly fertile ground in the indulgent soil of "The American Riviera." De Boer is fascinated by this youthful sub-culture. In his words, "when individuals in this environment create their own entertainment, they engage in what most outside observers would consider to be simple college indulgence or illustrations of post-adolescent anomie. My own observations attempt to seek out the humorous theatrics of these scenes.my goal is to paint honest narratives rather than ironic critiques." His artistic precedents as varied as the early Italian master of space Giotto, Goya, the Spaniard known for his charged psychological portraits, and contemporary painters whose work oscillates wildly between uncanny realism and impossible exaggerations of the human form, like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. Like the work of these artists, de Boer's paintings convey visually "the ways in which a spectacle affects an individual...how people define themselves and how identity is manifested publicly."

The Arts Fund has presented the Individual Artist Awards annually since 1988, awarding over $125,000 to more than 100 professional artists in the visual, performing, and literary arts. The Bloomingdale Family has generously sponsored the 2005 Individual Artist Award in Oil.

But Do Not Touch, 2005
72" x 72" diptych, oil on canvas