Franco Bocchi Biography
Franco Bocchi was born in Cologne (BS) on 25 November 1951. Franco Bocchi lives and works in Chiari BS and is an Italian landscape painter. His first drawings date back to the 60s when he was still a boy, but his real artistic journey began at around 20 years old, when he set up his own painting studio and later his own art gallery. The 1970s witnessed the first exhibitions of his works which, initially at a provincial and regional level, then extended across the national territory. The woods and the banks of the Oglio river were the source of inspiration that definitively turned the landscape to its artistic streak and it was in this context that he began to love it and feel the need to go further, to look for new ideas. The "journey" to discover new landscapes takes him to distant countries and to refine his painting technique, he stays in big cities to study the works of the great masters in museums and learn the secrets of the trade. So he resides in London to study the works of Constable and Turner at the National Gallery; he spent long periods in France in Barbizon drawing and painting the forest of Fontainebleau and in Paris at the Louvre to get closer to the spirit of romantic painters such as Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, and Millet. Provence and Umbria were also destinations dear to him for his artistic journey. In the early 80s he crossed the whole of North America covering thousands of kilometres, and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York he reviewed and studied the works of the painters of the Hudson River School: Bierstadt, Church, Cole, remaining deeply fascinated by them. In 1983 he crossed Brazil from north to south, staying and painting on the Amazon River and in Mato Grosso in the Pantanal, one of the most incredible natural reserves on the planet which was little known at the time, and on his return he organized the first exhibition of these places in his gallery made by a European artist. The Danube delta in Romania, the Hungarian Puszta, the Plitvice lakes in Yugoslavia, Istanbul, as well as Goreme and Urgup in Cappadocia, were also the destination of his numerous business trips, which went as far as the borders of Syria. Mahé island in the Seichelles, and the fishermen of Kiwenga beach. Franco Bocchi's life is closely related to his work: countless travels have provided him with new ideas, knowledge, study, experimentation, emotions, reflections and human relationships... everything you need to have, in short, to be a complete artist. It is therefore for this reason that, after forty years, his painting continues to express at very high levels an ever new poetry of the landscape crossed by a symphony which is a hymn to nature and the joy of living. Currently his pictorial production is oriented towards large-scale works, on the cycle of the seasons entitled "the destiny of the landscape". Bocchi is convinced that art does not need specialists to be understood and together with those few remaining talented figurative landscape painters, he continues on that path that will always make European painting great. From 1970 to 2016 he set up multiple personal and collective exhibitions with the greatest painters of the second half of the 20th century, in all the major Italian and foreign cities. Countless of his works can be found in Italian and foreign collections.
