User:Gregorybotts
Gregory Botts (born Harrisburg, PA, 1952)
Painting Beginnings, from 1970's
Gregory Botts was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1952. He studied at the School of Visual Arts and the Skowhegan School under the mentorship of Peter Heinemann, Fairfield Porter, and Paul Georges. 1
Botts discovered the figurative art of painters such as Alex Katz and Paul Georges and worked in that tradition through 1978. Having met abstract painters such as Larry Poons, Dan Christensen, and Larry Zox in the mid-1970s, Botts explored a purely abstract mode in the late 1970s. 2
Botts divides his time between New York City and Abiquiu, New Mexico. On his cross-country road trips, he paints landscapes outdoors, and in the studio he incorporates the landscape vocabulary and motifs into larger-scaled, more abstract work. 1
Gregory Botts' work stems from his thirty-year experience of painting directly from nature and then using those plein-air paintings as a source for large, more-or-less abstract studio paintings. He has painted in some of the most extreme picturesque American landscapes and recorded his experiences with a deft touch and a fluent brush. But the paintings in this exhibition don't stop there- where Boudin, Marquet and Fairfield Porter worked- they step farther into an invented pictorial space. 3
1980’s Soho, NYC
A major turning point for Botts occurred in 1980, when he was invited to teach at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Upon moving into a studio located on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Botts was deeply affected by the grandeur and luminosity of the California coastline. Reminded of visions of the sublime known through reading and viewing of 19th century Romantic literature and art, he was propelled into developing a series of paintings that use abstract symbols to convey a sense of the heroic. 2
Like the other painters discussed here, Gregory Botts shows an affinity for the tonal properties of color. In fact, he has shifted from a more colorful palette to exclusively black and white within his recent work A resolutely intellectual painter, Botts is also an unreformed Romantic landscapist, with roots stretching from the Barbizon and Hudson River Schools to the heroic panoplies of Still and Kline. If it seems incongruous to be a romantic and still allow oneself intellectual conceits, then one would probably react to Botts' work by seeing it as handsome, which it is. Each of Botts' strokes is impeccable, the image is compelling and dynamic, and his compositions are languid without appearing to sag. They are, at their best, very graceful works as well: it is as if Botts is interpreting Chinese scroll painting via Franz Kline; the formal integrity is such that one can imagine the picture reduced infinitessimally or enlarged infinitely, with no lessening of clarity at either end. 4
Gregory Botts' paintings have a sensitivity that is at once so subtle and so conscious that it reminds us of the hard polarities that inform them. 5
Retrospective shows of 1980’s
Two of the important writers on Botts’s work are literary critic Harold Bloom and poet David Shapiro. 1
I have come upon the paintings of Gregory Botts and have had my faith renewed in the perpetual possibility of a refreshed American Sublime.
Botts, always sublimely ambitious, offers a total vision, centrally based upon the High Romantic traditions of poetry and painting, European and American. So large a design necessarily courts disas-ter, unless handled with considerable irony and gentle humor, both of which fortunately abound, particularly in the stationing of two forlorn Beckettian tramps in each cruciform. These wanderers seek the maternal vase of earth, but it moves as they move, and their quest forever is frustrate. 6
In recent paintings, Gregory Botts presents us with a metaphorical art that is as enigmatic as it is enticing. Textured with rich sensuous surfaces that celebrate brushwork in an appealingly viscous state, the paintings are of evocative images that at once reveal and conceal narrative or symbolic con-tent. Temptation and denial, which together contribute to the work's aesthetic tortitude, are in fact two of many polarities of which Botts's paintings are built. Through unification of complements such as figurative and abstract, horizontal and vertical, and black and white-the dominant colors of his palette, Botts brings us to the fulcrum between the known and the unknown, where truth is housed in the poetics of transcendental experience. 2
The landscape imagery in Botts' recent paintings is from Santa Barbara, particularly the Deveraux beach area where he has had a studio at various times. Botts handles the lush vegetal forms of the area with a correspondingly sensuous brushwork that restores a physical presence to their otherwise dematerializing silhouettes. Botts' value contrasts are turned down a notch from Fowler's and everywhere there is a suggestion of a humid closeness of air and light. Even the stronger values and nearly complementary color scheme of terra cotta orange and ultramarine blue in his painting, '...the poem, the icon, the man', are mediated and softened, as if seen through the smoke of remembrance. It comes to mind that one of Botts' favorite writers is Gaston Bachelard, the phenomenologist of memory and reverie. 10
What lures one to the work of Gregory Botts is his receptivity to forms of geometry and the anti-geometric, to the rhythms of landscape and to the interruptions of abstractions. In him there is an extraordinary homage paid to the masters of a musicalist poetic, Stevens and Eliot. And while he has avoided the perils of an illustrative mode, he restores one's confidence in the structural rapport between a self-conscious painting and the most reflexive poetry, and without a diminution in either of the scale of content, if one may mix a metaphor concerning metaphor. In Botts, the use of antiquity's epos and the modernist lyric-epic has concluded with some very sensuous syntheses.7
The plenitude of Botts's art is vivid because it is haunted by the snow man and by death-the death of greenery and flowers, of historical memory, of future possibility. Against wintri-ness, Botts sends forces of life: images of a new spring, an ideal past, a perfected hope. In this contention, life wins out. 8
1996 Published Poetry
An interest in poetry runs through Botts’s practice, as evidenced in the titles of his paintings and in the volume of his own poetry, which he published as a companion to his visual work, Clouds, Leaves, Waves (1996). 1
There is a clear distinction between Clouds, Leaves, Waves., a Painter's Poem, and poems written by American painters, from Thomas Cole through Marsden Hartley. Gregory Botts, fierce in his devotion, as a painter, to the American Sublime, writes his painter's poem, not to stand by itself, but as a commentary upon his principal paintings from 1984 to 1993. Yet there is also an engagement with American poetic tradition, from Emerson and Whitman to Wallace Stevens. In his paintings, Botts is a conscious heir of Jackson Pollock and of Barnett Newman. He owes (as so many varied others do) something to Monet, and he strives for something of Goya's effect, but the relationship to Pollock and Newman remains curiously vivid, even as and when Botts gives us visions (in his most recent work) of human figures in a landscape. One suspects that some painters use poets, as many poets use painters, in order to substitute idealized precursors, in another art, for actual (and necessarily more threatening forerunners. This in no way qualifies the extraordinary love that Botts, and his paintings, manifest for Whitman and for Stevens, writers central to any American hopes for transcendence. A painter's notebook is only rarely an elegy for a great poetic and humanistic tradition. What we learn of Botts's craft is minimal; what we garner of his life is mostly oblique.
The values of painting rarely have been so intertwined with cognition and argumentative vision of a normative, national literature; Botts is startling in his ambition and energy, both as a painter and as a belated Emerson-ian. The paintings, though slow to win general acceptance, will endure. Clouds, Leaves, Waves. will endure also, as the testament of a painter's engagement with much that is best in the American literary canon. 9
"I have for a long time admired Gregory Botts's intense painting of Nature and idea, and am now convinced he is the rare thing, the painter-poet. Here Botts emerges with an ambitious epic cycle, at once tactful and particular as art criticism should be and also as lyrical and Romantic as an exfoliation of the Hero may be, with all the bold black-and-white of Botts's mythic pre-occupations. This book at once illuminates a significant body of art that welds figuration and abstraction radically and gives us the passionate hesitations of painterly thought as a continuous poetic scroll. The reader receives a double pleasure: a painter's journal in the moment of light and a poet's transformation in a permanent grammar." -David Shapiro, 9
"The grand themes of Gregory Botts's paintings are all here, in clear, glowing language, plus meditations on all that makes painting possible-and utterly necessary-at this difficult end of a terrifying century. -Carter Ratcliff, 9
1990’s Western Jaunt
Here is the American sense of openness and endless potential, the void into which Botts's wanderer, the figure he calls Crispin, is forever entering. Crispin travels westward, in the American direction, and he arrives in a peculiarly American place: a mountainous landscape that best demonstrates American ideas about scale and fate and history. The scale is heroic, and isolation is one's fate. History is absent.
Western civilization has left no traces on the most spectacular stretches of Yosemite. You see them, though, in Botts's pictures. One of these traces is Crispin himself, Botts's surrogate in the face of the natural void. In the picture titled Yosemite, he holds a book, an emblem of memory, of the civilized inheritance that gives structure and measure to the void of nature's infinite present.
Most change degrades the American land-scape. Botts argues that it could be otherwise, if we were more "like Walt Whitman"— to borrow a title from the painter. Whitman was not just environmentally sensitive, as he might be described today; his sense of the world's wholeness, its all-embracing unity, originated in his democratic faith. 8
In its powerful treatment of the interplay between reality and imagination, "Yosemite" becomes emblematic of Botts' central concerns. "Western Jaunts" does not take us to Yosemite nor to any other place we might find on a map. We are in a visionary landscape. The solitary figure called Crispin who foregrounds "Yosemite" (1992) reminds us that this is not the world as it is but the world as seen, and here, seen as if remembered. The figure seems nostalgic, lost in a cure beyond forgetfulness.
What is remembered here are pieces of the history of painting and a lost mythology of the American West. It is a remembering at once sublime and playfully ironic about the possibility of an American sublime, or any mythology for that matter, in 1993. Perhaps this self-awareness contributes to the sunset, westering tones in many of the pictures. The time here is a time of endings. Indeed, Botts creates an almost cartoon-like collaging effect that provides a formal allegory for the collaging of old and lost stories that inform these mindscapes. Their allusiveness reminds us in another way that the world is always a world as already seen, by others, and now again by each of us. And yet, what I find most powerful about Botts' vision is its refusal to rest within its own ironies. It is a vision that seeks to go beyond itself, beyond the world as already seen and to create a new world in which we might live. It hovers between the sublime and the playful with the difficult rightness of half- risen day. 11
2000’s Landscape into Abstraction
For the last 12 years Gregory Botts has been criss-crossing the nation with a car loaded full of art supplies, paintingthe sites and varying light he encountered. At first begun as a clarification of the larger abstract works that he was making in the studio, these paintings have grown into their own body of impressive works that feed and inform his larger body of work.
This exhibition tells the tale of his adventures, and gives witness to his commitment to experiencing firsthand thelandscape that has become the subject of his work. Paintings from Vermont, through Pennsylvania, to Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and finally California will take viewers on a tour through some of America’s most beautiful and desolate landscapes. 13
Botts has an exuberant but economic way with paint, marking the curve of a flower stem, the form of a mesa, and a cloud sitting in the sky with accuracy and poetic bravado. The landscapes are punctuated by geometric interruptions: squares of saturated color and black, jagged outlines that symbolize a break between the natural forms in the paintings and a studio or painting wall. They are the checks and balances in the middle of a relentless pursuit of adventure and the sublime, where motifs and geometry are constantly recycled and re-imagined. 1
Twenty years later Gregory's paintings are clearer - like giant watercolor frescos weaving together his experiences in other landscapes such as the desert near his studio in Abiquiu, New Mexico or the mountains around Aspen, Colorado. His process of painting outdoors enlivens his studio geometry with light and moisture and air. In the way Marsden Hartley makes baguette clouds or Marin paints waves like scratchy lightning, Gregory transforms his motifs, painting Aspen trees swooning in gold light like elegant actors in a Japanese Noh play or black sunflower silhouettes arching like overhanging street lamps against a big blue New Mexico sky. 3
Botts is clearly one of those painters who is motivated to paint as much by the romance of paint itself – its material qualities and its history – as by its ability to evoke many emotions and experiences uniquely. But he paints first and foremost to investigate and exploit painting’s relationship with the world.
A central experience in Botts’ work is the transition between interior and exterior space. This transition Matisse and Picasso solved in different, perhaps complementary ways: Matisse painted his way out the window, and Picasso drew his way in. Botts does both at once, certainly indebted to the two modern masters but imitating neither’s particular solution. 12
He emerges innocently but not naively into a world where nature threatens to become somehow "unnatural." Yet when we view the still sublime landscape through the prism of Gregory's sensibility, experience and identification with place, we are made to perceive the powerful relationship that continues to exist between nature and painting and us. 3
Stations Project, 2011 and 2015
In 2011, Gregory Botts completed a group of fourteen paintings. Medium-size and rendered in tones of black, white, and gray, these canvases can be seen as abstractions — and dazzling despite their somber palette. Diagonals inflect right angles, right angles modulate curves, curves enter into complex negotiations with one another. We could stop here, with a contemplation of the power — and the subtlety — of these forms considered purely as forms. This would be a bit disingenuous, however, for Botts fills his paintings with recognizable things. There are hieroglyphic indications of reeds and trees, intimations of mountains and cloud filled skies, and forms we decipher as parts of the human body: legs, a head covered with a wide-brimmed hat, an entire torso. These fourteen paintings show a person traversing a landscape.1
Gregory Botts begins his statement by quoting from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself; "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." He rightly associates Whitman with his other poetic hero, Wallace Stevens, and cites the later poet's vision of the American Sublime. 14
Whitman himself throughout his poetry sees himself as an American Christ and affirms that he hoped to write a new Bible for Americans. I myself in my endless broodings on what I have learned to call the American Religion have thought of Whitman together with the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith as the two grand American instances of religion-making. Botts intuitively understands that Whitman sees himself as replacing Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas, while not so much displacing Christ as Americanizing him.
Though Botts as a painter derives more immediately from the generation of Jackson Pollock, his ultimate precursors are Piero della Francesca, Giotto and Mantegna. His Stations of the Cross for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine are profoundly Whitmanian but also return us to something of the hard power of the great Italian masters of fresco.
Botts has always been a painter inspired by the wind, the sun, and the four seasons. His imagery of clouds, leaves, and waves derives from the tradition that passes from Shelley to Whitman and then on to Wallace Stevens. In his visions of the Stations of the Cross the fused figure of Walt Whitman and Jesus is seen as ascending much more than as falling. The imagery of Botts's paintings is never as abstract as first it seems to be. Whitman's obsession with reeds and all the other growth at the water-edge is amplified throughout Botts.
Whitman's triumphant resurrection flowers into a vast procession of Americans. Walt's power was caught forever in a magnificent tribute by Wallace Stevens:
In the far South, the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame. 15
2010’s New Figures in the Landscape
The paintings in this exhibition explore a limited imagery of abstracted blue figures. These figures reference a cubist version of Matisse’s Blue Nude, posed against a warm and verdant selection of greens. They are painted lushly and assertively with a directness that come from decades of painting and they resonate with a clarity of color and form derived from Botts’ study of European Modernists.
The blue nude in the landscape revered by Matisse and Picasso stems from their admiration of Cezanne’s Bathers. When one thinks of the blue nude in the 20th century, one has to think about the incredible collages that Matisse made in painted cut paper, his dynamic composition of abstract shapes that form the female body.
Botts clearly tells the viewer that he’s looked at these European Masters in his two tryptic paintings on paper, after Cezanne, 2020, and after Matisse, after Cezanne where blue figures are meshed into the landscape. These bold works have the directness of studies by an accomplished hand that connects paint, shape and color.
However connected to the European painters of the last century these works are, there is a truly American vision at work in them as well. The paintings, in particular, reflect not only the tradition of the French masters but also the experience of an artist who has spent the pandemic painting in the countryside, finding his color and form in a particular rural and bucolic landscape. 16
But not on a shell, she starts / Archaic, for the sea. The opening lines of Wallace Stevens's poem, "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage, signal a break. Perhaps it is a differentiation from an ideal-ized, European mythological vision of the nude, to a figure rooted in a new American art. Perhaps it is a metaphor for imagination meeting reality.
Gregory Botts's paintings contend with such disjunctures. In his work, the search for an American sublime bumps up against the reality of climate change; exuberance is expressed and yet also held in check; religion and myth are replaced by a search for divinity in nature. He makes paintings outdoors from life, and his studio paintings are abstract distillations based on both these motifs, and his works on paper.
The black lines, the squares within Botts's paintings, and the stacking of paintings together are the divisions between spaces, between imagination and reality. And yet, as Stevens continues, "She touches the clouds, where she goes / In the circle of her traverse of the sea." There is, in Botts's painting, also continuity and repetition; the seasons and the genres of art meeting and feeding one another, signified by concentric circles, forms and figures revolving within paintings.
In his studio, Botts commonly turns paintings on their sides, and leans paintings against one another. It is a normal part of the studio process, but it also reveals new juxtapositions and relationships. "A painting is supposed to represent truth, but one painting is never really the truth. Between two images put together, there is some truth," says Botts. 17
References
1 Jennifer Samet, Hyperallergic, Beer with a Painter, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/186367/beer-with-a-painter-gregory-botts/
2 David Rubin, Gregory Botts, Freedman Gallery, Albright College, 1988, https://www.albright.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Gregory-Botts.pdf
3 Steven Harvey, Jigsaw Poetry, The Nature Based Abstractions of Gregory Botts, Sullivan Goss Gallery SB, CA , 2006, https://www.sullivangoss.com/exhibitions/gregory-botts
4 Dan Cameron, The Submerging Figure, Arts Magazine, 1986
5 citation from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1986, Young Artist award winner
6 Harold Bloom, exhibition catalog, The American Sublime, Gregory Botts, Painting As Icon, Anne Plumb Gallery, 1990
7 David Shapiro, exhibition catalog, Domination of Blanks, Painting and Poetry’s Truth, Anne Plumb Gallery, 1989
8 Carter Ratcliff, exhibition catalog, Villa of the Sun, The University of the Arts, 1993
9 Harold Bloom, from the introduction, clouds, leaves, waves., published Turtle Point Press, 1996, https://www.turtlepointpress.com/books/clouds-leaves-waves-a-painters-poem/
10 Stephen Westfall, catalog essay, Botts and Fowler, at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, SB,CA, 1987
11 Pamela Schirmeister, essay for Ro Snell Gallery exhibition, Santa Barbara, CA, 1993
12 Peter Frank, On the Occasion of The Madrid Paintings, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe. 2015, https://davidrichardgallery.com/exhibit/216-gregory-botts
13 Paul Collins, Gregory Botts: Painting Along the Road, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN 2015, https://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2015/01/14/austin-peay-state-university-new-exhibit-showcases-road-trip-paintings-across-america/23-monument-valley-approach-24-x-36-oc-2011/
14 Carter Ratcliff, A Note on The Stations of the Cross by Gregory Botts, 2015
15 Harold Bloom, Text for Cathedral of St John the Divine, A Vision the American Sublime, Gregory Botts, The Stations Project, 2015 https://www.stjohndivine.org/art-ideas/past-exhibitions
16 Deanna Sirlin , Gregory Botts’ “plein air” paintings offer window into summer, Arts ATL, https://www.artsatl.org/review-gregory-botts-plein-air-paintings-offer-window-into-summer/
17 Jennifer Samet, Coming Round, essay for exhibition catalog, 2021, Farmer Family Gallery, Ohio State University at Lima
External Links
Official Website, GregoryBotts.com, https://www.gregorybotts.com/
Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, NYC, https://shfap.com/events/gregory-botts-chuck-bowdish/
Alan Avery Art Company, Atlanta, https://www.alanaveryartcompany.com/botts-gregory