Richard Bosman

Is this what it feels like to be an artist?

- Brad Phillips

I'm Canadian. Like all Canadians I was raised on American entertainment media. I watched American news. I watched American television. I watched American movies. American media both entertained and educated me, showed me what the world was and how to live within it.

America, in many ways, is my very favourite movie. It's a multigenre epic, with a particular talent for depicting action, comedy, romance and horror.

When I first encountered Richard Bosman's work, it seemed as if I'd found an artist whose paintings were the storyboard for this most incredible of films; someone who understood just how noir America is, with its historical cast of sleazy characters, cynical scenarios and emphasis on personal over communal prosperity. Or at least that's how some psychogeographic component of Canada, crippled by both an inferiority and superiority complex, characterises our southern neighbours, whom we're both fascinated by and judgemental of.

Many immigrants to North America learn English by watching soap operas. Soap operas compress language into its most fundamental, juicy elements, by using melodrama to tell personal and dynastic stories. When learning a new language, words related to survival are the ones you must grasp first; words like danger, love, help, fire, police and emergency; all components of a noir, melodramatic vocabulary.