“There was a little pull chain she was about to pull, and it said something about ‘getting lucky tonight.’” In the painting, a man and a woman with a goiter stand under a light. Beth Bojarski tells me about a group of four laughing at her paintings in a booth, but “the wife in particular sees that one and just roared.”
A few minutes after they left, the husband came back and bought the piece. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen my wife laugh,” he said. “And anything, anything that makes her laugh like that, we need to have. I want that in our world.”
Few people buy Beth Bojarski’s paintings expecting to do so on first interaction, and stories like this are endemic to her experience. Look through her collection and you’ll find an Edwardian gentleman sniffing glue, a crow with braces, and a series of paintings with subdued palettes and incredible titles. If you take yourself too seriously, you might be spooked. You would also, unfortunately, be missing the point.
“Three viewings before they’re ready to buy,” Beth says. “The first time, it just might be ‘what is this?’ The second time, you’ll laugh again, and it grabs you again. The third time, people are ready to buy. That happens a lot.”
It makes sense. Beth’s palettes are often faded, and her paintings feature fancy characters who look like they belong to another era. There lies the brilliance of her craft. Our own lives don’t mirror the hypersaturation of social media and edited images, and it’s easier for us to take ourselves less seriously with anachronistic subjects. That combination of distance and closeness allows us to open, connect with, and enjoy the heart of what Beth is offering. In a perfectionistic world, Beth’s humor and imperfect characters feel like a welcome reprieve.
Humor comes naturally to Beth, who credits her dad, a prankster with a boisterous laugh. “He introduced it, and that’s the place that made me happy. Getting Dad to laugh when you knew Dad was funny was the goal. To hear that laugh, and the power of what that was. And then just following that.”
Beth got a late start in oil paints, trying them for the first time at 28. Trained at Kendall College of Art and Design as a watercolor artist capable of highly technical realism, she went on to work full-time at Kohl’s as a creative director overseeing product design. She had stopped making work for a long time. “Watercolor is unforgiving. You need to know what you’re gonna paint before you go in because once you make a mark, it’s there.” When her dad opened an art gallery and asked her to contribute, she picked up oils. “I loved how they felt, how they moved across the board.”
She began using oils like watercolor, adding water to create thin washes of uneven colored surfaces where she could find and see things in shapes. The subjects and tone she chose, though unintentional, were a complete 180. She was only going to paint what she enjoyed, and the “raw, cartoonish, distorted” characters that defined her early career were born.
All her pieces sold immediately, and she kept going until she took the leap and quit her job. “It was the hardest, easiest thing I ever did.” Since then, the desire to find things in the shape has defined Beth’s approach. Beth reacts to paintings; she doesn’t plan them. Many have layers beneath that didn’t feel right. She collects funny phrases in a notebook, but rarely uses them. Beth’s artistic philosophy lives in the instinctual and instantaneous. She builds a relationship with her subjects and intuits her way through. The jokes aren’t prewritten; they’re found.
Even so, Beth’s work isn’t just silly. It’s vulnerable and emotional. There’s grief, acceptance, and lonesomeness. When I ask her if she has a favorite work, she remembers Emily Waits, which shows a girl with a birthday hat sitting, waiting alone for her guests to arrive. Beth relates to her with tenderness, saying, “Emily, you’re not alone.” The piece sold, but Beth sees her now and then.
Just as the cartoon-like quality of her first works has fallen away, the distortion is on its way out. She’s moving to a higher level of realism and larger pieces now that she and her husband, sculptor Mark Winter, purchased a new space in Milwaukee with a studio and a home. The studio is larger than the 10- by 12-foot bedroom she painted in for 22 years. The home is kept as an Airbnb gallery filled with Mark’s furniture and local art. Guests can live with the art and purchase pieces if something speaks to them.
Devotion is paramount to Beth. She paints 11 to 12 hours a day, 9 months a year, only stopping between October and December. She spoke to me about the importance of taking your craft seriously, building a routine around when the muse comes to you, but then fiercely protecting time. She has a calling, and we all benefit from it.
Imperfectness, awkwardness, vulnerability. For Beth, these words point to the same thing in her paintings and what feels important. There’s a truth in the awkwardness, and that truth is worth cherishing.
She tells me about They Gathered Up The Fingers No One Seemed To Want, which shows birds in flight collecting fingers. At a fair, a man asked why she painted it. She explained, “People can be really turned off by a missing limb or somebody’s imperfection. … This idea of the birds, they didn’t have a problem with it, they wanted to bring it into their world.”
The man replied, “‘Oh, I just love that so much.” As he was leaving, he said, “Hey Beth.” He lifted his hand. He was missing half a finger and lined it up to the spot in the painting.
Beth says, “He gave me a wink and walked away.”
Efrat Koppel is an arts writer and lifelong arts lover and practitioner. Efrat writes about local artists, creative process, and the role of place in shaping artistic identity. When not writing, Efrat is involved with Dane County Food Collective, supporting food systems and community resilience in southern Wisconsin.
Photographs provided by Beth Bojarski.
bethbojarski.com
Oil Paintings capturing the sweet awkwardness of the human condition