He worked every day, consistently, sought of work as absolutely necessary for his own well-being, but also for his productivity.

Paul Henri Bouguinon was born in Belgium in 1906.

He studied art in Brussels and Paris.

He was a writer, photographer, owned an art gallery, and traveled extensively.

He visited many countries including Spain, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Haiti.

During his travels, he met his future wife, Erica.

We met in Haiti in 1947, when he had come from Europe as a correspondent for his Belgian newspaper, Le Fair, and was expecting to spend a few months traveling through the Caribbean, Central America, and was writing a reportage for his paper and writing stories.

And I was there to do.

Anthropological fieldwork.

It's a romantic tale.

In 1950, the couple settled in Columbus.

Erica was teaching anthropology at the university, and Paul was painting.

He was his own most severe critic and he would, if he was not satisfied, would tear it up and start all over again.

Sometimes he'd destroy pieces that he had on a temporary basis accepted that had met his criteria and then tear that up.

I remember many years ago when someone came in and said, oh, it must be so relaxing to paint.

Is absolutely incensed at the idiocy of the remark.

It's nothing relaxing about painting.

It's a tremendously intensive experience.

For much of the time that Paul and Erica were living in Columbus, he didn't exhibit his work very much.

He seemed to prefer to just concentrate on doing it rather than working to arrange exhibitions.

During the last couple of years of his life, he had a number of very nice exhibitions or participated in a number of exhibitions at Gallery 200.

During the summer of 1988, Paul busily prepared for a second exhibition at Gallery 200, scheduled for January.

He died September 22, 1988.

The exhibition was held posthumously, and titled, Homage to Paul-Henri Bougignan.

My husband died last fall, last September.

And I was concerned, too.

So, um... Legacy of his work to the attention of the public.

I spoke with Dr. Tellier at the Schumacher Gallery at Capitol.

I knew that they had wonderful space and she was interested in the possibility of a retrospective showing and things worked out very quickly.

And I think both of these are untitled, but... Anne Bremner curated the exhibition in the Schumacher Gallery at Capital University.

This is intended to be a pretty complete survey of the range of his work.

In terms of subject, in terms of style, and also chronologically.

He doesn't have one style.

That's one of the things that I think makes the exhibition interesting is the diversity of different kinds of work that he did throughout his lifetime, and sometimes even within a very close range of time.

In the show, there are genre scenes, scenes that are based on his memories of his travels.

So the pictures give a suggestion of his life.

There also are the rather marvelously hypnotic and fascinating anonymous heads.

These are not, they're imaginary portraits maybe.

He really had a marvelous color sense, a great sense of freedom of line.

And here in these late works, they're not really, or to him, he would never have considered them totally abstract or totally non-objective works.

He was really not very much interested in critics and in critical debates and in discussions of modernism versus postmodernism or what have you, but that he was more interested in looking at what other artists did and looking at his own work.

Well, I think that his work is important and that it has not been seen enough and that it deserves to be looked at and to be appreciated.

Like to share it widely and have him be known as I think he deserves to be known.