Gregory Botts’ exhibition Arcadian Interlude, at Alan Avery Art Company through July 23, consists of paintings and drawings made during the pandemic in a farmhouse in upstate New York. The artist spent his mornings working plein air and then reworked his bucolic and pastoral views in the studio. The result is a body of work that gives the viewer a virtual window into summer.
For instance, in July Day Lilies #1, 2021, a large oil on canvas, Botts sets a can of day lilies in a pot on a table outside. The painting is made with broad strokes put down cleanly and with much bravado in large swatches of warm green, grays, one blue, a yellow and two shades of orange. The simplifications are direct and assertive; the brushstrokes themselves become entire shapes that create the landscape in this limited palette.
The blue flowers in the pot are exactly the same color as the sky that peeks out behind the tree. This kind of dialogue within the painting is more about abstraction than representation. Here, Botts walks a tightrope between the motif of the American landscape and abstraction. Botts paints what he sees, then filters it through a language of shape and color that he has been pursuing for decades.
A New York artist, Botts has been honing his language of modernist painting for over four decades. In the 1970s, he studied with and was an apprentice to the American painter Paul Georges, who influenced Botts through his ideas about abstraction within figurative paintings.
Georges’ most famous painting is a large self-portrait where an image of his entire body fills the vertical axis of the canvas; the physicality of his form and presence dominates, much the way Botts uses his blue figures to divide abstract compositions with a figurative form. Georges often dealt with the figure in the landscape, painting different versions after Cezanne’s Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) throughout his life.
Botts was also influenced by the American artist Fairfield Porter, who worked directly from nature, always looking for the prosaic rather than the pastoral and finding abstraction in the figurative. Botts has continued this tradition of painting on site in the landscape but has developed his own pictorial language that distorts and layers his imagery in ways that bring it to a new level of abstraction within representation.
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.
A small pencil drawing titled drawing after Blue Idea, going forward, from 2022, is a line drawing of just the figure itself as a vertical form on the page. The line is clear and evocative — no ornamentation or background is needed.
This vertical figure in the drawing is further realized in a large oil on canvas, Blue Idea, 2022. The figure becomes a compositional force that divides the painting from left to right, splitting a large passage of muted green that signifies landscape. There, small blue figures appear in the distance. A beautiful horizontal passage in cool yellow at the bottom of the composition becomes a strip of sunlight.
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.
Many artists reflected on nature as they escaped their urban studios during the pandemic. This moment of pause has become an occasion to be in nature, to take the time to look, to feel and to be in the landscape. In Arcadian Interlude, Botts demonstrates an assurance of color and line within compositions that he has been developing over the course of his artistic life. These paintings and drawings manifest his particular vision through plein air painting steeped in color.
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Deanna Sirlin is an artist and writer. She is known internationally for large-scale installations that have covered the sides of buildings from Atlanta to Venice, Italy. Her book, She’s Got What It Takes: American Women Artists in Dialogue, (2013) is a critical yet intimate look at the lives and work of nine noted American women artists who have been personally important to Sirlin, based on conversations with each one.
