When looking at the hypnotic and technologically-inspired text art painted by Stonington- and Brooklyn-based pop artist John Boone, there is a question that will inevitably come up for the viewer. Is it machine made or is it painted by hand? The simple answer is: yes, those precisely spaced letters and words, exacting font, and perfectly straight margins are all painted by Boone’s own hand. And no, he doesn’t use tape or rulers.

Reactions to this fact about his work have ranged from awe to anger. When he explained his process during a 1996 lecture at a New Jersey college, one listener yelled, “You’re a liar!”

“It just doesn’t make sense to me,” he says, bursting out into a quick staccato laugh while staring at his paired paintings on display at the Mystic Museum of Art’s Liebig Gallery on an early October afternoon. “Why would any printing press make something like this?”

The exhibition, titled “Pairs,” run through Nov. 11. It showcases the artist’s iconic text-art through paired paintings created over the last 20 years. Boone’s works, some of which are 7, 10, even 12 feet tall, are all painted in more or less the same fashion — featuring monochromatic backgrounds decked out with lines of laser-precise words hand-painted by Boone. This text, which Boone deems “digital,” was created by the artist himself in the 1980s and is at once both nostalgic (reminiscent of Tron and Atari) and futuristic. It becomes clear that the artist is experimenting with a duality between the precision of technology and the imperfection of humans.

He highlights this imperfection by painting idiomatic words and phrases onto the canvas. An idiom, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "an expression that cannot be understood from the meanings of its separate words but that has a separate meaning of its own."  

“They have no author, they are just there, and everyone has (them) in the back of their heads,” Boone says.

Finding these idioms requires patience, however. Boone is constantly seeking out and listening for phrases that catch his ear, reading billboards and researching online.

He likes to work these idioms around central themes such as work, counting and time, and he often likes to pair idioms that play off each other in unexpected ways. “Dirty work” and “paper work” are placed together, as are “work table” and “workaholic,” for example.

“I like toying around with the idea of pairing opposite ideas,” he says. “They are a sort of handshake between the human and high-tech … a handshake between the empirical side of technology and the imperfect human sides of life.”

Much of Boone’s work seems to make more sense only after talking with him. He is a man who doesn’t come off as a very self-involved character and one who likes to laugh at himself. He stands at slightly under six-feet and, on the day of this interview, he is dressed in a casual short-sleeved button-up, a small flip notepad can be seen peeking through its front pocket, an easygoing smile framed by rigid black-rimmed Ray Bans.

If there is any indication of the type of artist Boone is, this might be a good example: on the Fourth of July in 1996, the artist decided to hire a plane to fly a banner across the Rhode Island and Connecticut coasts that read “Hey You.”

“I dared myself to just do it,” he says, laughing.

“The banner didn’t really have much meaning, it was just meant to be a lighthearted hello to thousands of people lining the beaches below,” he says. “And yeah, not everyone got it. Some people were so glib about it, and immigrants, surprisingly, liked it the most. They saw it as goodwill that could be received as goodwill.”

A New Jersey native, Boone was brought up in Quaker schools, yet even as he attended Earlham College in Indiana, a Quaker college, Boone couldn’t help but feel an attraction to the booming art scene of 1970s New York City. After graduating from his college art program, he moved there in 1975 and began his career as an artist while working as a taxi driver on the side.

While Boone still lives and works in Brooklyn with his wife, the couple also owns a house in Stonington, where Boone spends half his time maintaining a studio in the Velvet Mill.

Boone’s signature text-art style arose in the 1980s, after years of painting what he called “cartoon machinery.”

“It was like something out of the Jetsons, and that was kind of fun, but I couldn’t see (that work) having endless possibilities. (In my text art), I see endless possibilities,” Boone says.

The famous New Yorker magazine cartoonist Saul Steinber was also a major influence.

“To me, his work was the cat’s meow. His work told the best stories. And when he used text in his works, he made it come alive. It wasn’t just black and white text on a white sheet … he made it do stuff,” Boone says.

But perhaps the real reason behind Boone’s obsessive art style arose after he quit smoking and started meditating.

“(This art) really told my mind that there is another way to do things. It’s one of those things that when you stop a bad habit, things open up … And doing this keeps me sane in a way,” he says.

The process to complete one of these pieces is no easy undertaking. Boone begins organizing each prospective work by using a computer to plan out the phrases to be used, where they will be placed and the colors scheme throughout. After laying on the background color (which often requires three coats) to the canvas, the difficult part begins with the stenciling and then the painting of the letters, each of which requires four to five coats, Boone, says, in order to make them “pop.” One painting alone can take up to six months.

“It’s neurotic, so much control goes into this. But at the same time (the paintings) have to seem like they fall out of the sky. They look effortless, but they’re not,” Boone says.

 m.biekert@theday.com

If you go

What: “John Boone: Pairs”

Where: Mystic Museum of Art, 9 Water St., Mystic

When: Through Nov. 11: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. daily except closed Mondays

Admission: Free

Contact: (860) 536-7601, www.mysticmuseumofart.org