While I don’t see myself as a landscapist or wildlife or aviation artist, all these elements appear individually or in combination in my paintings – much as they appear in the day to day experience of the Peace River Country where I live and work. My unattainable goal is to achieve a perfect understanding of the world through painting.
“Since the advent of the camera, too much art has been seduced by the photograph. The camera records great detail everywhere but can’t bring forth colour and definition in the shadows. The strengths of the human eye are the opposite – I choose to record what the eye sees, a world of space and light.”
My paintings are investigations into the ways of nature. What combinations of temperature and moisture produce snow of this quality? How does light reflect or refract from a bird’s or an airplane’s wing? When inventing these scenes from memory and imagination, I’m forced to examine why things are the way they are, which is very different from a straight representation of a physical scene or object.
Biography
On leaving high school in Waterloo Ontario, Brian Don Hohner headed west to attend the Alberta College of Art and Design in the 1970’s to study Painting and Printmaking and it was there that he first heard about this fantastic job called Fire Lookout. They actually paid you to sit and look over the forest and paint. At the time, there were 142 Fire Lookouts, half were artists.
Flying in helicopters to the Lookout and spotting fires in the wilderness soon seemed like a better life to him than city streets and the urban art scene.
He was offered a Lookout job in the Peace River country that had always intrigued him, and it became his new home and studio location where he could paint the north country and it’s unique landscapes. He continued to work in the forest fire aviation area by managing the Manning Air Tanker Base for many years and satisfied his love of working within bush aviation. Recently a contract Aircraft Management Officer with Alberta Forestry, he uses that as the wellspring of imagination for many of his aviation paintings.
He has contributed to the Canadian Aviation Artists Association and has shown in galleries in Edmonton, Grande Prairie, Fairview and Peace River. His paintings hang in a number of different countries.