His aesthetic developed from a unique blending of his European roots, early twentieth-century Dutch school art education, and his time in New Mexico and southern Arizona. Bolsius was a true cultural nationalist, fully embracing the layers and panoply of diverse heritage that constituted a rugged twentieth-century American West. He articulated his conceptions into his own pictorial identity, forged in a multitude of media. Beyond canvas and paper, his architectural and design legacy includes a small collection of hand-carved furniture, doors, and pueblo and territorial style buildings that embrace the tenets of southwestern revival. 

Bolsius drew inspiration for his paintings from the grand magnitude of the desert and its cultures; his furniture and doors descend from European traditions, blended with the primitive Spanish Revival designs popular in New Mexico in the first few decades of the twentieth century. He was not alone on this artistic adventure; with his brother Pete and sister-in-law Nan, the trio handbuilt architecture from a base of nineteenth-century adobe ruins, creating the spaces and walls his art would fill. The Bolsius style was at the same time revival and original. Except for his last project, the Bolsius buildings are clustered in the Old Fort Lowell Historic District in Tucson and are quintessential Arizona. 

Bolsius, having come of artistic age in the early twentieth century European modernist tradition, found an artistic voice in the cultural vocabulary of the American West. The end of World War II marked the rise of American modernism, ushering in a revolutionary shift in visual arts, graphic, and architectural design. International Style and abstract expressionism dominated the creative environment. The revival styles and realist impressionist paintings, hallmarks of the pre-war era, were suddenly seen as anachronisms. This paradigm shift marked a decisive end to the last vestiges of the surviving old West, yet nostalgic regional residue fueled vibrant dude ranches, Western wear, and local graphic design. Bolsius remained true to the values and artistic Western canon of the pre-World War II era. His style and content were inextricably linked, his impressionist and expressive paintings articulated the disappearing West, something that Bolsius innately recognized was fading. 

Although he occasionally exhibited his art in Tucson, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and New York, and was recognized for his artistry and skill, he shied away from self-promotion. Driven not by commercialism but artistic exploration, Bolsius sold only a few paintings during his life. He supported himself through his woodcraft and commissions to build doors and furniture, and during this time quietly painted the landscapes and romantic environs of the Rillito River Valley and the Sonoran Desert. In totality, his body of work corrals an essential sense of the Southwest and reflects the cultural influences surging through the first half of the American 20th century.