James Bohary (born 1940 in Brooklyn, New York) to an English mother (Alice Wood born in Bolton Lancashire in 1907) and an Indonesian father William. He is an American Abstract Expressionist painter. He has studied graphic design, illustration, drawing, as well as art education (B.S. from New York University). He emerged from the New York Studio School in 1969, where he studied painting and drawing with Philip Guston. His influences include prehistoric art, Sassetta, Rembrandt, Cézanne, and Willem de Kooning.
His paintings are painted in thick, multilayered impastos, gestural, heavily textured, and sometimes with a sense of horror vacui with gestural details extending over every area of the painting. His working methods involve years of building dense masses of oil paint. A wet-in-wet layer is allowed to rest, sometimes over a long period, then more layers are added.
While his paintings are abstract and almost always non-objective, they draw influence and inspiration from nature-ranging from landscapes to seascapes to animal life. In his work, he also recalls his personal explorations of specific places, such as time in New York, Puerto Rico, and Newfoundland. Often, the richly colorful buildup of paint extends to the edges of the canvas, creating an almost topographical surface.
