Email
PrintGallery Tour: Landscape Artist Marc Bohne
The hazy shapes of trees and land formations create an implied geometry.
Marc Bohne’s moody, mesmerizing landscapes bring to mind cloudy days in the rural West. The hazy shapes of trees and land formations create an implied geometry, lending a sense of introspection, spirituality, and mystery to the otherwise straightforward subject matter.
“I don’t go out and look for pretty things to paint — I look for abstract shapes,” Bohne says. “Abstraction to me is the underpinning of everything. The abstract shapes are fundamentally why our eyes stop and are interested. That’s the first thing that trips our brain — the organization of big masses and colors.”
Born in 1955 in El Paso, Texas, Bohne now lives in Seattle. He takes painting road trips in a Ford E-150 van that has 300,000 miles on it, doing quick sketches and describing the places in his journal — which is where the introspection comes in. “I tend to be moody and observe things and analyze quite a bit,” he says. “I don’t see the world as a big old happy place, although I enjoy it.”
Consider Silver Stumps, a bittersweet Washington scene of blurred trees painted with glazes of oil paint. “I was in this farm area where there were these giant stumps that had weathered into silver objects, sort of reminding me that the whole place was probably once forested and we cut it all down,” Bohne explains. “Compositionally, the stumps themselves act like anchors for the whole thing.”
Bohne also does smaller artworks, some as contained as 4-by-5 inches, but whatever the size his work is getting noticed. Bill Gates is reportedly a collector, and Bohne’s landscapes have appeared in the movie Georgia Rule and the TV shows 24 and Criminal Minds. “My paintings are about that time in between the highlights — between the sunsets and the remarkable light,” the artist points out. “I say it’s thoughtful, representational work.”
