Biography
Kirk Boes is a painter based on Maui, Hawaiʻi, where he has lived and worked for more than fifty years. Born in Newport Beach, California, he moved to West Maui as a teenager and has remained closely tied to the region’s cultural and physical landscape throughout his life. Before committing fully to painting, Boes spent many years as an educator and arts administrator, working in public education and serving in leadership roles within community arts organizations in Lahaina.
Boes has painted for several decades, with an active studio practice extending back to the 1990s. During that period, he was a member of the Lahaina Arts Society and participated in the island’s long-standing artist community. His work has been collected by visitors to Maui from around the world, forming an early foundation for his ongoing professional practice.
He studied at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and has maintained a sustained engagement with art history, particularly the Impressionists and post-Impressionist painters. Over the past fifteen years, painting has been his primary professional focus. His work has been exhibited and collected in Hawaiʻi and continues to be developed in cohesive, interrelated bodies of work.
In August 2023, Boes lost his home, studio, and town in the Lahaina fire. The paintings produced in the aftermath form a significant chapter in his practice, marked by continuity rather than rupture—extending long-standing formal and thematic concerns while responding to lived experience. His current work is conceived as an evolving, integrated body, grounded in place and attentive to the psychological and spiritual dimensions of human experience.