Charles Bolsius

Craft and Grit

Born in Holland in 1893, Charles Bolsius lived in the American Southwest from 1930 until his death in 1983. During those years, he translated his experiences into paintings, drawings, woodblock prints, architecture, and hand-carved furniture and doors. His canvases are filled with unexpected bold color, expressive emotive brush strokes, and dynamic skies, capturing the moments between the dramas of the desert.

Art and Design

For half a century, Bolsius explored artistic themes of light and composition, solace, landscape, and the experience of nature imbued with the ideals of the rugged and expansive western landscape. His paintings ebbed between an Arizona impressionism and social realism rendered in loose bold brushstrokes, his drawings sketched softly with graphite capture an essence of place, and his dark inky woodblock prints are born from the European expressionist movement.