Duane Bousfield
American, b. 1960
Duane Bousfield is a New York–based contemporary artist whose work explores the relationships between abstraction and meaning, texture and depth, expression and communication. Raised in California, he earned a BA in Psychology from San José State University before studying Art Therapy and Painting at UC San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz—a foundation that still shapes how he reads the human mind through mark and gesture.
His path took its defining turn while he worked as a night watchman at Apple during the development of the first Macintosh. In that nocturnal solitude he built line clouds in ballpoint pen, in pursuit of a style so personal it would become universal—teaching himself how lines could imply depth, space, and character. For thirteen years he lived as a full-time artist, painting large-scale canvases by day, some as big as nine by seven feet, drawing and refining by night, until the voice was unmistakably his own.
In 1995 he moved to the artist community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, exhibiting across Brooklyn and Manhattan. From 2001 he worked as an art consultant in East Hampton and at galleries in SoHo and on 57th Street; through those years his own studio practice continued quietly, if scaled to a Manhattan apartment. Those years culminated in the Pearls series—thirteen oil-on-panel paintings made between 2014 and 2018.
In 2020 he developed a technique of one-line drawings in latex, evoking both the labyrinth and the Japanese ensō, and a larger studio in 2021 returned him to expansive canvases. A 100-page monograph followed in 2022, along with two solo exhibitions at Upsilon Gallery, New York. He now lives and works in Hell's Kitchen with his husband of twenty-four years, an Alzheimer's specialist and dementia-care trainer whose mission Bousfield shares, as technical and creative partner.
Today Bousfield is a full-time artist in Manhattan, represented by Upsilon Gallery in New York and London. His work is held in private and public collections including the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; the Esalen Institute, Big Sur; and Apple, Cupertino.