Amery Bohling | Infinite Well

The Grand Canyon has been a bountiful muse for painter Amery Bohling.

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

If Amery Bohling could distill her creative practice down into one thought, it might be this one: “I see something pretty and I want to paint it. I want to consume it, and the best way I know how to consume the beauty in the landscape is to reproduce it.” Her lifelong love of art and nature’s astonishments has materialized in countless paintings, the most notable of which depict her decades-long enchantment with the Grand Canyon. It is her muse, her infinite well and the ongoing pinnacle of a life spent consuming through creating.

Bohling didn’t have one moment when she knew she wanted to be an artist. The desire to create, to make things with her hands, to interpret the world in arrays of line, light and color was with her from the beginning. She embraced the innate urge from the get-go. “I was an artsy kid,” she says. “I was always drawing.” Her childhood in Phoenix was filled with opportunities she sought out and seized, bolstered by support from her parents, who recognized her zeal from the outset.

Bohling describes herself as “self-motivated not self-taught.” She enrolled in classes at the Scottsdale Artists’ School when she was 16 years old, beginning a long affiliation with the institution where much of her formal art education would take place. Although she didn’t originally consider that art could become her career, Bohling majored in painting and drawing at the University of Arizona and earned her BFA. “It was always going to be my path,” she says.

Similar to when she sought out art classes as a teenager, Bohling took the initiative to firmly plant herself in the art world and grow both her technique and presence as a landscape painter. After connecting with other artists in her genre, she learned the importance of building a network of like-minded colleagues. She joined the Tucson Plein Air Painters, and eventually, she was featured in Southwest Art’s 21 Under 31. Bohling spent several years in California, and while there, she joined the California Art Club and earned its 2005 Emerging Artist Award for her scenes of the state’s coastline. These experiences proved to be a formidable leaping-off point for her, both in terms of career and community-building.

Back in Arizona, she continued her education, taking workshops with prominent Southwest artists Joseph Mendez, Scott L. Christensen, Kevin Macpherson and Ray Roberts, among others. These classes instilled in her the understanding that experiencing the subject matter firsthand would be crucial to any successful landscape painting. Although she had studied plein air painting in France early on, Bohling didn’t fully appreciate the importance of spending time on-site, of immersing oneself in the space and all its visual and spiritual elements.

Bohling cut her professional teeth as a landscape artist painting scenes along the California coast. And while she enjoyed those, it wasn’t until she returned to her native Arizona that she found her most fulfilling creative inspiration: the Grand Canyon. She hadn’t visited the fabled landmark since her childhood, and upon rediscovering it as an adult, she experienced a sea change. Suddenly, she was mesmerized by the Canyon’s light, color, atmosphere and physical mass. She had to paint it. “I feel like it just clicked right off the bat,” she says of her discovery.

Bohling has been painting the Grand Canyon from myriad angles for more than 20 years, and she sees no end in sight. “There’s so much to know about it,” she says. “There are so many other layers that you only get to know by going there a lot over a long period—over many years.” She views painting the Canyon in terms of peeling back the layers to uncover something else intriguing; inevitably, she finds new perspectives with every trip—either in new places or in the same areas she goes to time and again.

The North Rim, the South Rim, Moran Point, Tuweep and Havasupai Gardens are just a few of her preferred locations from which to paint the Canyon’s marvels. Aesthetically, Bohling is drawn to contrasts in the Canyon’s landscape—the detailed facets revealed by intense sunlight and the drama that storm clouds bring. Not only does she revel in its vistas, valleys and waterways, but she also enjoys getting to know the people who operate the park as well as the Indigenous cultures that first populated the area thousands of years ago. She considers all these aspects in her work, painting with a desire to bring the stories and history of each place to bear in her compositions.

Bohling travels to the Grand Canyon several times a year to collect reference imagery in the form of plein air sketches and photographs. She also catalogs her emotional journey as she traverses popular and hidden spaces, filing away her experience in her heart and mind so she can infuse her paintings with the feelings encountered while there.

Of her creative process, Bohling remarks, “Everything definitely starts with being outside.” While photographs of the landscape serve as a valuable tool in her art making, her treks into the landscape are paramount to creating an authentic artistic translation of her relationship with the sights, sounds and soul of the land. This is particularly true of the multilayered, aesthetically complex Grand Canyon. “In order to get the right feel for the Canyon, it requires being there,” she says. Developing a personal and in-person bond with the landscape allows her to channel its visual impact along with the emotions she feels as she takes it all in.

When Bohling starts a painting, she begins with a combination of plein air sketches and photographs she took on location. She maps out her composition meticulously by first completing a detailed drawing of the subject and then progressing across the canvas, building up additional details and layers of color. She takes delight in working in her studio and gallery space on Main Street in Old Town Scottsdale, where she paints on a custom-made easel built by her father, surrounded by her favorite plants and accompanied by her dog.

Bohling bases every composition on real life and her time spent on location beforehand. “There’s no escaping the need for plein air painting and what the colors are actually doing in nature,” she explains. “The more you know, the more ability you have to play with ideas. You can always break rules, just know you’re breaking them on purpose.” Recently, her color schemes have progressed beyond the tonal to incorporate more contrast and saturation.

She enjoys experimenting with “theatrical” hues, which serve to amplify the natural elements and at times approach the hyper-real. At its core, Bohling’s work is about beauty, the majesty of nature. At the same time, however, she seeks to infuse her visceral and emotional interactions with each subject into her paintings.

“I want people to feel an emotional moment,” says the artist. “I want to replicate how I felt when I was there.” Bohling wants to impart not only the light, color, texture and grandeur of the landscape but also the exhilaration, wonder and even the trepidation she felt while visiting each space. She has experienced the Canyon in sun, rain and snow, including a blizzard so thick she could hear the Canyon but not see it. The eeriness and respect for wild nature only bring her closer to her source, connecting her with, in her words, “something more than yourself.”

Moving into the future, Bohling looks forward to broadening her perspectives on the famed national park. “I want to build a collection of work that’s going to be a different take on the Canyon,” she says. Undoubtedly, as she continues to peel back the multifaceted layers of the Grand Canyon, she will be able to access uncharted territory, geographic and visual, tangible and intangible.

Elizabeth L. Delaney is a freelance arts writer and editor.

contact information
amerybohling.com

This story appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.