October 2018 Exhibit
Marc Boone
Shaman’s Way
Imogen Gallery is honored to present a second solo exhibition for reputable artist Marc Boone. Boone who has enjoyed a career that has spanned both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, now resides in Ocean Park, of southwest Washington. For this exhibition, Shaman’s Way he brings a series of oil paintings dedicated to jazz masters and his love of the dramatic landscape he now calls home. The exhibition opens October 13th during Astoria’s Second Saturday Artwalk, with a reception held from 5 – 8 pm. All are invited to join us for the reception and to meet Marc Boone who will be available to answer questions about his work. Light bites and beverages will be provided by the Astoria Coffee House and Bistro. Shaman’s Way will remain on display through November 6.
For his exhibition Shaman’s Way, Boone brings a series of paintings paying homage through metaphor to the late great jazz artists that he has held a lifelong love for. For five decades, their music has been the backdrop of his painting process. From his New York studio to Baltimore and now Ocean Park, the indelible music of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and many others have been with him consistently, silently instilled within his paintings. Since relocating back to the Northwest, Boone has also found great inspiration in the dramatic and mystical landscape of the coastal region while never letting go of his upbringing, surrounded by the volcanic hills of the Palouse area of Eastern Washington and the northern glacier lakes of Idaho. His work has not been an attempt to emulate nature in a realistic manner, but to instead offer a poetic depiction of the mystery of the natural world.
Native American culture has also influenced the sense of mysticism infused into his work. This series, Shaman’s Way, has its origins in the medicine men and women who connected with nature and all creation to influence the world of good and evil while also instilling the influence of random back notes that come through the genre of jazz. About that connection he states: “For many of them the world’s center was a tree—the axis mundi—which the shaman ascends for enlightenment. Jazz musicians—Coltrane, Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock—and vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn—embody the shaman’s way along with some painters. For me those painters who most exemplify the shaman’s tradition include Van Gogh, Mondrian, Morris Graves, Charles Burchfield, Rothko and Jackson Pollock.”
As an artist and educator, Boone has enjoyed a diverse and rewarding career. After earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, formerly the Portland Museum School where he studied under the iconic Northwest painter Louis Bunce, he went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Richard Speer, art critic and writer who wrote about Boone’s previous exhibition at Imogen, eloquently described his work as “confident and assured, yet never showy, these are the works of a master of chroma and composition who, by talent and good fortune, enjoyed early personal exposure to some of the giants of modern and contemporary art.” Beyond mentorship by Louis Bunce, Boone after moving to New York City found himself in the midst of many of the art world’s influential figures, including the likes of Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, Salvatore Scarpitta, Edward Dugmore, Clyfford Still, Sam Gilliam, as well as others who ranked as illustrious leaders of modern abstraction.
Boone has exhibited his work at the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, Spenser Museum, Lawrence, Kansas, and the Boise Art Museum. He has also exhibited his work extensively in galleries in New York, Washington DC, Baltimore, Idaho, Montana, and Seattle where he was represented by Polly Friedlander, a great champion to the Northwest contemporary art movement and founder of the former Espy Foundation that offered residencies to artists in idyllic and historic Oysterville, Washington. His work can be found in private and public collections, including the permanent collections of the Boise Art Museum, the Tucson Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
