Adkins Arboretum, January 2009
Marc Boone was born in Idaho and grew up in Palouse, Washington. After studying briefly with Ken Hinton in Spokane, he went to the Museum School—now the Pacific Northwest College of Art—in Portland, where Louis Bunce had a profound and lasting impact on his work and life. While working on a Master of Fine Arts, from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, he studied with Edward Dugmore, Sal Scarpitta and Babe Shapiro. He divides his time between Maryland and the Pacific Northwest, where he has a Baltimore studio and is establishing a studio in Ocean Park, Washington.
A recent article and interview with Boone by former Washington Post critic Mary McCoy notes:
“…[the paintings] are inspired by landscapes Boone has visited in Maryland, Massachusetts, his native Idaho, and the Washington and Oregon coast. But instead of portraying the details of specific places, he uses his memory of light, color, mood and weather as a starting point.
These are quiet paintings in terms of their large, simple forms, but look up close and you’ll find evidence of layers of color full of fingerprints and the marks of a palette knife scraped boldly across the paint….The surface of the paintings have a soft, matte feeling. This comes from combining oil paint with wax into a sensuous mixture that has a slight translucence…
At the 1962 Seattle World’s fair [as a teenager], Boone first saw Abstract Expressionist paintings. “It all made sense to me,” he recalled. “It was like an epiphany.” In the works of artists such as Willem deKooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Mark Tobey, he found an approach to painting that was active and spontaneous and gave him the freedom to experiment.
The history of this experimentation can be traced in the remnants of color showing through scrapes in his thick paint and at the edges of his canvases.
“I usually start with a really strong color. I can’t stand white canvas. I get nervous,” he laughed. “I start with the knife and maybe blue-green or red and go up from there. I don’t know what will happen.” (The Bay Times, Stevensville, MD, December 10, 2008.)
A one-person show, A & P (Atlantic & Pacific), was featured at the Lorinda Knight Gallery in Spokane in September, 2009. His work can be seen in Baltimore at the C. Grimaldis Gallery.