In response to questions about earlier work and today.

There seems to be a renewed interest in the black and white paintings of the 80's. The black and white has been ever present through the years in my Painting. It seems to have “been behind” most of what I do, still to this day. There has been a renewed interest in the 80’s versions I actually painted mostly out of doors. Below is a response to some questions about it.

I came to meet Hank Pitcher in 1972 at in Goleta, CA at UCSB, on the advice of Paul Georges who was one of Fairfield Porter’s  best friends at the time in Long Island. Hank later invited Paul Georges, Al Leslie, Jane Freilecher, Charles Garabedian, to the school, as well as myself, a younger  representative of an ambitious NY figurative painting.

In 1976 Hank made a 2 person show at the CCS Gallery at UCSB, Sigrid’s abstract  and my figurative paintings together, prescient as to what was ahead.

I met Julian Schnabel in 1978, and realized his putting together of the two on a canvas. I set out to explore this direction myself.

I had 10 one person shows in Soho at the Anne Plumb Gallery from 1984 through 1993. These all had aspects of Black and White landscapes I started in Santa Barbara as I taught Spring Quarters through the 1980’s.

One of these paintings from 1989, which now seem a progression— of my thought up to today— hangs in the lobby, at the Federal Reserve Bank in NYC—just now.

 In 1994 I opened Tony Shafrazi's new Gallery in Soho. The paintings were of a seeming new western direction, painting at Yosemite and Big Sur. Ro Snell showed a group of these new paintings when she had a gallery in Santa Barbara.

One of these paintings is now in the collection of AD&A, University SB Art Museum.

I taught with John McCracken at CCS and his wife and mine were best friends. On one of my cross country trips I stopped in New Mexico where he now lived.  I ended up living there half the year for the next 25 summers and now consider it my second home. I lived at Richard Tuttles' home and was friends with Susan Rothenberg who I knew from NYC.

In the 2000’s I made large landscapes in color and in B/W and fragmented parts that reflected a cycle I saw in the landscape as I painted out of doors a habit I never gave up. Painting in, plain air, has given to me most of my content outside of that critical theory I am steeped in, in my life in NYC. Obviously this has been a struggle to bring these two into some perspective, but this problem is the reality of my work.

I showed at Gerald Peters in Santa Fe through those years and here in Santa Barbara at Sullivan Goss, in 2008. The relation of landscape to a regionalism— has hampered my success to those that look or know, --no further.

When the pandemic hit I moved to a family house in Upstate New York and am part of a community there as well around Hudson, NY. 

In the early days David Shapiro a NY school poet and Harold Bloom wrote extensively on my work. Carter Ratcliff continues to write also.

Last year Steven Harvey who I showed with earlier made a show of Black and White paintings, from 1985.

They were received well and Walter Robinson, who sadly just passed, came to the Gallery to interview me on a Zoom.

Well I guess there is no short way to explain the importance of Santa Barbara to my work. 

I had a show at the Contemporary Arts Forum in 1988, here in SB. Robert Orten a collector from Cincinnati and La Jolla purchased 4 large paintings and gave them to Honolulu  Academy , where I had a retrospective show, Denver Art Museum, La Jolla Museum, and gave the below painting to the, Santa Barbara Art Museum.

I picture it here.

Ongoing Text #1, "Being a windy night...",  the sea, falling soldiers, birds cry out. 1988, 

oil and wax on canvas, 117 x 117” 

The painting was in a show at Santa Barbara CAF in 1988 or 89. The painting on right was pictured on cover of Arts Magazine with an essay by Harold Bloom, which caused quite a stir. The painting on Left,  owned by Denver Museum of Art.

Ongoing Text #2, 'Whirling...resembling the Presences of thought...', Acrylic, oil and wax on canvas, 1988,  117 x 117” 

A sister painting in my studio in New Mexico, with a painting from 2024, A Wall in Mexico #3.

Gregory Botts at Steven Harvey FAP

SHFAP presents far north distant west, a series of paintings by Gregory Botts from the mid 1980s. This group of oil and wax works, mostly on paper, date from 1984 and later. Several were done on a trip with Botts' partner, painter Jenny Hankwitz to Nova Scotia, and one work of the series was included in our latest exhibition, 12.21 Solstice. These paintings relate to a larger group of works in which Botts synthesizes his practice of plein air painting with the bravura brushwork and structure of abstract expressionist painters such as De Kooning and Kline. 

Botts' admirably articulated surfaces are as much his subjects as the landscape images they contain. In David Shapiro's essay from a 1989 catalog published by the Anne Plumb gallery, he describes Botts' feelings for these surfaces as "a kind of truth to which he returns."

Gregory Botts, Iona Landscape, Nova Scotia #2, 1984, oil and wax on BFK paper, 28 1/8 x 42 3/8 in. 

Botts told Shapiro that his "God idea" was "the flowing universe," something we can sense profoundly in these works, which transform the gallery space into a glade in the woods when gathered together. The winds seem to whip around us and the trees loom over and around, created out of globs of paint and broad sweeping strokes. This equivalency between freewheeling painterly application and the complex textures of the natural world are part of what lends this body of Botts' work its immediate appeal. 

Gregory Botts is a painter who travels between studios in the desert of New Mexico and upstate New York. Traversing the country in a specialty tricked out Toyota van, he paints from life in the expansive American landscape and visits the often extraordinary works of modern and contemporary art housed in museums throughout the country. In addition to his painting, which has been shown in galleries all around the United States, including the Anne Plumb Gallery, SHFAP, and at the Tony Shafrazi and Salander O'Reilly Galleries, Botts has a published volume of poetry entitled clouds, leaves, waves... 

 shfap.com | 917-861-7312 | info@shfap.com
208 forsyth street, new york, ny 10002
gallery hours: wed - sat 12 - 6pm

Landscapes at Center for Figurative PaintinG

Happy to be in this landscape painting show with Fairfield Porter, Paul Georges and Lois Dodd, among others.

Teton Sunset with Fairfield Porter behind.

Another painting the Center owns.

Other paintings of the group, from 2008.

Gregory Botts at Farmer and the Cook, Ojai CA

Gregory Botts at Alan Avery Art Co Atlanta GA

June 10 — July 23

Gregory Botts, Coming Round, The Ohio State University at Lima

Installation at The Ohio State University at Lima

Coming Round

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.

If you would like a catalog send address to contact above.

1993 Yosemite and Big Sur

Nevada Falls, has just been received into the collection of the University of California at Santa Barbara Art Museum. In 1990-92, I went back to Yosemite and Big Sur to paint plein air. I camped and painted. I was teaching again at UCSB and was looking for a wilder landscape to paint.

It turned out to be a wonderful adventure and I started to make larger paintings back in Brooklyn. Tony Shafrazi heard about them and asked me to be the first show reopening his new gallery on Wooster St.

The Ro Snell Gallery, meanwhile also liked the idea and offered me a show of a group of the paintings. This was before the Shafrazi Show.

Paintings of landscape are perceived differently in different places. There is a problem with landscapes being seen as amateur or tourist oriented in beautiful places where they are plenty.

It seemed in NY they might just be seen as pure painting again. I had always a strong sense of the political in relation to environmentalism and I was also interested in the American story of myth and adventure. I thought painting itself suited these themes and could bring them together.

This painting, pictured above, Nevada Falls, has just been received into the collection of the University of California at Santa Barbara Art Museum.

Painting on the Beach in Mexico

For the past 6 years I have been going to Mexico with friends. We have gone to see Pre Columbia Art in Mexico City and around the Yucatan. We go to the beach and I have made paintings. The Archaic images resonate in my mind and they have been especially fruitful in my works evolution back in NY. One remembers how all this “American” art influenced “Modernisn".

Winter Painting, Canaan, NY

I have been painting this winter upstate on the Massachusetts border of the Berkshires. Last winter I was witness to a snowstorm which cleared and a full moon appeared . Orion was visible very strongly also .It was such a phenomenon, I got out my paints and painted the scene out of the window. This experience has been the subject of these blue winter paintings.

Summer and Fall Studio shots.

Juxtaposing two different sets of paintings working in different directions. Making finally a sort of cycle or revolution together. I’ve started to ascertain, a similarity to the Earth’s movement and the way the Earth’s cycles and revolutions influence idea and thought.

Catalog for Telluride Arts Show

Catalog for Telluride Arts Show

http://www.blurb.com/books/8752400-the-great-rotation-or-how-to-think-about-the-earth

Telluride Arts, Telluride, Colorado June 2018

Telluride Arts, Telluride, Colorado June 2018

A show of paintings in Telluride CO this June 2018

The Great Rotation

In celebration of Earth Day 2018, Poetry Month, and a show of paintings in Telluride, CO this June.

The book may be found here: http://www.blurb.com/books/8480755-the-great-rotation

HE WAS REACHING ACRoss AmericA

American Pilgrim, 

POP PilGriM

some PoP, EpiC pOp--

The MorninG

4

always came incredibly--

from The Great Rotation

a book of poetry by Gregory Botts

2017 Paintings/ Figure in the Reeds

Work completed in New Mexico Studio this December

2017 Painitngs

New Mexico Studio, December 2017

Peter Makebish, Chelsea, NYC, 2016

We did a pop up show in 2016. It was fast and I was disappointed with the results at the time. I had big expectations as I hadn't shown in Chelsea in a while. The work is still looking good though. This is a book/ catalog we made for it.

Colorado, Aspen and Telluride

I've had a good time painting up in Colorado the last 15 summers, from my place in New Mexico it is a great drive. I teach up at the Anderson Ranch Art Center and did a stint in Telluride. I have some paintings in the Telluride Gallery this month in a show curated by James Haywood a friend of mine through John McCracken. Jimmy, as known to his friends, was McCracken's best friend and we got to know each other through John when he lived in NM. I'm leaving to teach soon at Anderson Art Center in Aspen where this regular painting of the landscape started as I teach it there. We go out on the ranches of Snowmass and Aspen and paint up a storm-- literally most afternoons, so there are good clouds. These Penstemon flowers bloomed a couple of summers back-- they were amazing and became a theme in my studio paintings They are the something I look to happen as I paint out of doors giving me clues to my ongoing investigation.

Castle Creek Penstemon, Hummingbird Flowers

Plein air painting.

Flashe drawings from the studio

Castle Creek, Hummingbird Flowers #2

Some new Paintings from the Ghost Ranch, New Mexico 2017

Indian Paint Brush and Coreopsis, 10 x 30", oil on canvas, 2017

Wild Flowers on Monastery Road, 10 x 30", oil on canvas, 2017

Ghost Ranch from Monastery Road, 16 x 24", oil on canvas, 2017

Ghost Ranch from Highway, 16 x 24", oil on canvas, 2017

Ghost Ranch Monument, 16 x 24", oil on canvas, 2017

Western Lagoon Paintings 2016-17 finished in April, New Mexico

These paintings have been in the works for two years they were worked out in drawings from Winter 2016.