Announcing Coming Round, Ohio State University at Lima, Oct 21, Catalog available w/ essay Jennifer Samet
Gregory Botts: Coming Round by Jennifer Samet
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 idealized, 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.
Paintings leaning against the wall relate to the “planks” of John McCracken, who saw them as a link between the real world and the spiritual world. Botts met McCracken when he moved, from 1979 to 1982, from New York to Santa Barbara, to teach at the University of California. In the years before that, Botts had studied at the School of Visual Arts with Peter Heinemann. He became connected to figurative painters in New York, and the circles of “painter-poets,” also working on the East End of Long Island. This group included Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Larry Rivers. This would inspire Botts’s own interest in poetry, as both a reader and a writer.
“She scuds the glitters / Noiselessly, like one more wave.” Botts has, for decades, driven across the country, from the East Coast to the West, painting outdoors along the way. He describes his painting process:
I take regular trips across the country from New York to my studio in New
Mexico, and make paintings in the landscape while I’m on the road. For
me, going off making landscape paintings is just as conceptual as Michael
Heizer going out there digging in the ground with tractors. It is adventure
in the literary sense. With the destruction of the earth – how do we think of
that? I think about Picasso’s idea that painting is an investigation of reality.
Three 2018 paintings titled “High Water Risin’” refer to the Bob Dylan song, and its homage to Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere.” The songs were a response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. A decision to demolish levees near New Orleans left hundreds of thousands of African Americans displaced and homeless.
They are black and white paintings, a format which has been part of Botts’s work since the 1980s. In them, forms from the landscape and still life paintings coalesce into a reduced palette and geometric vocabulary. As Botts’s notes, “The paintings begin in the landscape with real information. Then, I become interested in the abstraction that I find in them. I make works on paper and paintings in acrylic. I start to see the shapes by reiterating them.”
In these paintings, Botts juxtaposes forms that exist right on the surface, against a deeper space behind, where black and white paint is troweled, horizontally, across the painting. This too is connected to McCracken. Botts remembered that he and McCracken “talked about this horizontal trudging in the landscape, when all of a sudden, if you stopped, and went “Aha!” that was like a clap of hands. So there is the dragging of the black and white paint across the canvas as well as bringing everything back to the surface – the clap of hands.”
He continues, “Eventually I began calling the deep space ‘romantic,’ and the surface space ‘classic.’ Going from the deep space to the surface seemed to be the whole idea of painting. The deep space was analogous to Jackson Pollock and the surface space was analogous to Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman. My idea was to keep the two things, and put them together.”
In “High Water Risin’ #3,” the vertical, perpendicular T shapes on the right half of the painting are what Botts calls reeds, and these float on the surface, untethered from the ground, as if by high water, with wave lines nearby. On the left side of the canvas are stacked curving shapes with vertical lines, with one form almost like a thought bubble rising to the top of the painting. This sequence becomes like a ladder - aspirational. “High Water Risin’ #1” includes a concentric circular form at the upper edge. This form, which suggests continuity, but which is interrupted and cut off by the painting edge, is the target, bringing us back to reality.
The circular form is related to a recurrent motif in Botts’s landscape painting: that of the sunflower. When Botts was painting in the East End of Long Island, he would encounter fields of sunflowers, cut them and put them into a jug. In front of the jug he
would place a string of conch shells. This still life arrangement was set on a low table or stool on the beach. The resulting painting would show the flowers and shells as a dominant foreground element, in front of the seaside landscape. These forms seem to be the basis for the High Water paintings.
Botts says, “In myth, what is so great about the motif of sunflowers is the sun. The heroes are identified with the sun coming up. Harold Bloom told me the word “mythos” is about describing the change – the earth spinning every day, and how we relate.” The sunflower paintings also connect to Botts’s interest in Van Gogh, in particular a triptych that Van Gogh had planned but not realized: the painting “La Berceuse,” (1889), flanked by two sunflower paintings. Van Gogh had envisioned that the triptych could offer serenity and comfort to the viewer, that in looking at it, they would feel as if they were being sung a lullaby or rocked to sleep.
“Thou Orb aloft full-dazzling / thou hot October noon!” opens Walt Whitman’s poem. Botts was aware that Van Gogh read the poetry of Walt Whitman. He considers Van Gogh’s repeated swirling lines a reflection of Whitman’s words. Botts’s painterly energy is the equivalent of Whitman’s exuberance. There is a performative aspect to his brushstrokes and their dramatic economy of means; how he makes large paintings outdoors and on the road; and the rotating and stacking of paintings in the studio.
Botts’s landscape paintings are distinguished by their full color, the way that blooms reach to the sky, the strange, seductive and bold geometry of how he marks clouds and branches. They celebrate unadulterated settings like Big Sur and Joshua Tree, mesas dotting the land in New Mexico, and skulls under the August sun. However, his paintings are never just about image: they are about forms interlocking, and the conversation between surface space and deep space. This conversation is ultimately a marker of the painter’s presence: his process of making the painting. The deep space signifies what came before; the surface space are later changes. He invites us in, allowing us to feel his own connection with both the painting and the place.
“Not as when the goldener nude / Of a later day / Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp / In an intenser calm.” In Botts’s Western Lagoon series, a figure emerges from the reeds. She is, sometimes, that “goldener nude,” an iconic figure, a deep Grecian blue marked, with surety, in black outlines. Botts has explored the “Hero” figure in his work, a central male figure in the landscape. Botts has called him, variously, the “Poet,” the “Traveler,” and “Crispin” - also a reference to Stevens, and his poem “Comedian with the Letter C.” It is a rugged American individualism he explores, along with mythology, and the archetype coexists with the cliché.
Ultimately, the “goldener nude” and the “hero” are metabolized into the abstraction of Botts’s most recent paintings, like “A Moment's Pleasure, the Earth's Imagining, and Change,” 2021. The reeds and figural elements tumble around the periphery of the large-scale canvas. The golden light and deep blue of the day revolve and come around into the dreams and ideas of the night studio. Two white “windows” float in the middle of the upper portion of the painting, where the darkness is energized by the radiance of black-on-black brushstrokes. As Stevens explores in his poem “Sunday Morning” —”Divinity must live within herself “— nature, “all pleasures and all pains,” and in Botts’s case, the act of painting itself, replaces religion and icon, and is internalized across the canvas.
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