Making the Earth, New Mexico

Landscapes in the Studio

These paintings have been made in the last few years using plein air paintings like I have just made this summer.









I enlarge them from, the oil-site paintings, in Flashe acrylic paint on Arches paper.

Here the forms are abstracted from the more natural and a flatter and more modern surface is made from the information.





These paper paintings I made in 2001 and have used them to make the blowups you see above.




A more developed painting has a figure, this painting is called Buddha for Rudy. Rudy is Rudy Burckhardt, a painter I knew and liked. He had a relationship with the Beat poets and made a photo of himself in the Sierras, sitting zazen, surrounded by beer bottles.



Obviously the painter is looking for something, on some kind of quest. Emerson said, "Natural facts are Spiritual facts." One makes an order of these things one sees.

continue, Madrid Night Studio

This was being painted from the flashe drawing I made from computer mockup. It was painted in acrylic first, a habit I got into when I was painting in a smaller studio here in New Mexico and couldn't take the fumes of the turpentine anymore.

I was painting freehand and liked the distance and autonomy the freer paint gave the larger version. Although I lose the more rigid surface I get from squaring off more carefully, the puzzle-like connecting like pieces I also like. Not to get too complicated here but that level may come again in the future as another layer of
paint.





(a year later, painting in oil)

What I meant below, as the genres I work through, is the repeated surface that makes the what I call Symbolic level appear. They appear more 'right' or 'true.'

It's on its way there now.






I decided to take the two panels apart and let them be separate paintings.

Here are a group from 2005-06, starting to work again.

You can see some of the original 2000, Madrid series paintings here: http://www.gregorybotts.com/

Looking back to beginning of: Madrid Night Studio Paintings

In 2004, I moved a lot of my paintings from NYC to New Mexico. I noticed as they lent in piles against the studio wall their different relationships to each other. I liked the juxtapositions between them as much as each ones own individual integrity.

I made some 30 x 40" drawings in flashe paint, from things I mocked up on the computer.



I am into the process as much as anything. I like the levels of genre I seem to "progress" through to get where I'm going.

Cycling, revolving...

When I was finishing Aspen Night Studio, a painting from 2006-- it was upside down it looked good but it was already complete as an idea, so I wasn't going to just turn it around.









They are little worlds with N/S/E/W directions, whole metaphorical realizations of selves in relation to a world in abstraction-- and I fancied my new paintings the same or similar, revolving in the stars.

So it is pretty easy to see it upside down.


So I have this world, earth, in the sky now surrounded by the desert, mountains, the sea--




each phase a different light, morning, noon-- with flower, sun, and evening sunset, revolving--

The earth in the sky.

Abiquiu Studio, 3 August

I was surprised to see something come together that was just a result of watching an evolution in the studio take place.

A bit ago, I was trying to make a picture of the earth. I made a simple drawing it ended up being used for an invite for a International Crisis Center Benefit, George Soros's organization.



Later, I made a large painting version of it, it was while my new studio was being built in New Mexico.
The painting was leaning against the wall with some others and I liked something I saw-- I started another painting last year.

Big Sur, "...end of distances."

These are studio paintings that have been made the last few years as a continuation of "The Western Jaunt", as the series begun in 1993 was called.









These are new landscapes, enlarged from paintings painted plein air, or on site, 15 years ago.












This big painting of the sun going down is from the same spot as the site painting just made, it was made last year using a older site painting.

I don't usually use such an old painting as I like the natural information to be fresh in my mind. But also there is an artificiality I like that is more like Art, and I have made numerous paintings from this original plein air through the years.

This Nature and Art thing are a constant tug and pull.

More Yosemite Studio Paintings

These large studio paintings I havent seen in 14 years. They were in a show at Ro Snell Gallery in Santa Barbara in 1993. They have been in storage there since that time.







Ken Johnson wrote in Art in America, "Now, in what looks like a major breakthrough for him, Botts has boldly extended the latter impulse into a surprising suite of big, philosophically loaded allegorical landscapes." he went on to say







"As a group, the paintings at Shafrazi are connected by an implied narrative of a solitary hiker's trek into the mountains. Depicting spectacular wilderness scenery - majestic waterfalls, precipitous slopes, etc. - and, in some cases, the heroically monumentalized wanderer himself, the pictures hark back to the Emersonian pantheism that inspired the painters of the Hudson River School. This romanticism is complicated, however, by the style in which the paintings are made.





Rather than painting realistically or expressionistically to create the kind of thrilling illusions of space and elevated feelings that sublime landscapes traditionally offer, Botts works in a style derived from comic illustration. Forms are outlined cartoon style, colors - mostly blues, greens, grays and browns - are slightly grayed but bright and unmodulated. There are no shadows, and objects such as trees or clouds are represented by generic signs. This manner of depiction imparts an eccentric humorous and slightly ironic spin to the contents, establishing a mood of rapturous giddiness."

Back at New Mexico Studio

I arrived back to New Mexico and was having a good time seeing all the paintings together on my studio walls. I pulled out some old paintings of Yosemite I painted back in 1993 to see how they looked with the new ones.





I painted first in Yosemite around 1990. I went back a number of times. In 1993, Tony Shafrazi the art dealer saw the paintings and offered me a show. He had seen a larger blown up version. I spent that summer making 10 large paintings, painting in Brooklyn for the show that fall.







I had invented a figure that started off from Long Island, in a series named Paumanok. It was named after a Walt Whitman poem, an Indian name that meant "fish shaped island".







The figure was associated in my mind with that 19th century poet -philosopher explorer of the new land.
Back then someone called the figure a ' Pop Pilgrim'.

New Studio Blog

I'm going to post studio ideas here rather than confuse the Landscape Blog.
click on link below for the Landscape Blog:

http://gregorybotts.blogspot.com/