Gregory Botts

I started making a figure again in 2012. It had always seemed the project was to create a figure that worked for contemporary culture. I had thought that the figure would come out of my figure drawing as I taught it my whole life. I was surprised when the larger idea was coming from Art itself and Matisse and Picasso. Matisse seemed to be trying to make a convincing reality and Picasso seemed to be subverting it. This round, was what I was interested in as a figural reality.

There had been progress from 2012. There was a formal direction which wanted to simplify. There was a more narrative and naturalistic direction also. In 2020 during covid, a backyard Arcadia was begun. It happened rather accidentally in relation to making a still life; the figure extended from that reality. The formal seemed more mythic or symbolic while the naturalistic sense wondered who these figures were.

A maybe third phase was chaotic. The chaos seemed good for the composition. There was a chaotic political atmosphere and things were up in the air. A Idealistic naturalism seemed far away. But then that distance seemed also to locate a figure I was looking for in space.

The narrative and formal seem to cris cross as form and content. I was always interested in fragmented archaic art as in Egyptian and Greek ruins. I liked the idea of our own self conscious time creating similar ruin. It fit in my cyclic idea of a seasonal mythos. An idea of figure would fall from its rightness to a redreaming in further quest. I don’t see a formal apotheosis, but a constant renewing of idea and figure in differing directions though there is a rational thought tying the evolution together as one would look for the sense.