Julian Schnabel at SB Film Festival

I have had a love of Julian Schnabel and his paintings since 1978, and through the years to 2026, just now, when I recently saw them at Mnuchin Gallery, in NYC.

I was introduced to Julian in a pivotal time, and at a momentous party for Larry Rivers, given by Nathan Joseph across from Joni Mitchell’s artist loft in Soho, maybe in 1977.

He was introduced as a figurative painter, myself identified as a figurative painter also, I wondered of the association. I was of the more traditional lineage. Paul Georges and Fairfield Porter leading to Alex Katz. Julian was more out of Philip Guston and his abstract roots. Guston was teaching at the Studio School where many of my friends were so there was a link. But Julian was also privy to the Whitney Program’s forward ideas of experimentation and a strong relation to the Art World’s culture of the time.

I was out in Long Island in the summers and Jackson Pollock permeated the atmosphere. My girlfriend worked for Helen Frankenthaler and many of my friends were abstract painters, though older like Poons, Christensen, and Zox.

When I say love above, it is in the connection of that moment to Julian’s  in relating an image to that abstract surface. We didn’t know yet of the profound relation of an inner and outer reality, it’s collision and later relationship.

In those days every move was recorded in the Soho News, in Art in America, Art News and Art Forum. In Vogue, in the New York Times, in New York Magazine in the myriad voices registering each move. In Ross Bleckner, and David Salle’s, work I often felt I had just read the same article and had a similar response in my paintings.

We would go from the downtown bars to Julian’s opening at Mary Boone, amazed at Julians effort, The Doctors and the Patients, painted on broken crockery. Jabbing him on the arm— that he had really done it. Had made the outsized motion we all searched for.

Different formal moves were new and immediate registered, by us all. Salle and Schnabel were in the forefront and had a dialogue in between themselves even painting on each other’s paintings. I went home and made my own.

It was an exciting time and I was offered a job in CA, I had few options and there was a salary, a working studio and wonderful landscape space. I should have stayed in NY probably it was the most fertile time and was soon to dissipate in strategies of that Art World culture seemingly corrupting those exciting discoveries.

I was out painting 10’ paintings on the beach. I was making my own large gesture. It was a reaction to the repressive 70’s we all felt lucky to have emerged from.

I missed a big Leo Castelli show, but the media got the images out there and I knew them, and every other artist’s move by heart. By 1984 when I had my first one person show in SoHo things were well on their way.

Julian as the leader of this atmosphere was now isolated at his openings, surrounded by glamorous models, and Art World movers. We would wave a last good luck, and congratulations.

Somehow the importance of those exciting formal moves became rote. Everyone was incorporating the moves. It became about charisma and presentation. Ultimately money supplied the pathway. One could not express such a view as everyone was on this ‘hopeful’ path, looking for their big break.

In 1989 I guess I got mine but it was of an opposite way of thinking. Harold Bloom recognized what he thought as the authenticity of my work and applied the word Sublime to it. Not the charismatic Sublime, but the Sublime of authenticity and well probably those early gestures of Schnabel and also Kiefer which were equally powerful.

Harold in his essay, termed the now seeming lost gesture as, “ imposters, fashionable painters, and inchoate rhap-sodes.” Well my big break although I was centered in some of the best criticism of our time— I was effectively a goner.

Critics like David Shapiro, and his student Barry Schwabsky, and a small group at the time saw the value of Harold’s essay. It became the cover of Arts Magazine, and I had small retrospectives in Pennsylvania and California and Hawaii. But there was no money and the Art World machinery was nowhere to be seen. It went no further and the SoHo art world began to close up. So I was seen as Sincere and Earnest. The Irony and the Reality of this cultures’s ethos, as being essentially weightless, in the face of a dwindling criticism, lead us to all be out there on our own. 

Many like Julian had so much still in place it would last and become what was left of a missed possibility, the possibility that Art could have the place it did in early Modernism and the authentic Expressionist gesture of Abstract artists like Pollock and Newman, Rothko and deKooning.

Serra, Johns, and Marden set an examples of this authentic reality but few had the tenacity to hold on to their difficult realities.  Julian stayed in the near background for all these years because of the physicality he discovered to represent  what profundities he did unearth in those early days.

In returning to California and the freedom I enjoyed there not having the comfort of support, I explored, looking for new ideas, watching for any hint of a new energy.
I found it in the Sublime of the natural world. But even that Natural Sublime seemed too uncomfortably edgy for our now plush world ignoring any of the real Horrors, the Horrors, of a dissappearing individual freedom and an environment in which to practice it.

I saw Schnabel’s 2026, Mnuchin show. Though I’d seen the works now many times at different venues which showed then to much better effect, as the Peter Brandt show. The works have a depth at times that reach deep into our humanity. He is a great artist. Julian though is maddening in how he is so involved in the fame thing as Warhol, he is enthralled by it. 

Getting now to the festival movie, he went on for five minutes about Johnny Depp and what a great painter he was regardless of actually how little he agreed with his methods.

His movie In the Hand of Dante, plays the game. It is peppered with the violence although it toughens the film’s ideas at places— possibly, it is the violence we have created ourselves to aggrandize ourselves in our plush anesthetized world.

The Dante which the movie purports to be about is seemingly pretentious. I would have loved to have reflected for any moment on any of the wonderful text collaged into the finally Hollywood medium however deep its pretensions. I can only reflect upon Trauffalt’s wondering if the medium of film would ever last or be worthwhile in relation to great Art.

But Julian is capable of bringing to the fore wonderful Ideas like the ‘sigh’, of art, when the artist becomes his poem. 

Then, falls pretty flat when he blows a single hole in the head of a victim saying “this is where your soul was.”

None of this though would matter except that Julian was using Dante, Dante to establish the gravity of his thoughts or ones he found in the screen play or text he used for the movie.

Maybe the gunshots ringing out like Reservoir Dogs or Bad Lieutenant are the broken plates he ‘draws’ upon to register our broken time. I looked for a healing device, a word of strength as Dante certainly can deliver. Our art has done little to mend our horrendous moment. 

Julians paintings did this though.  Maybe, as Julian received a luke warm reception there at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, Julian in a look of desperation asked, “Is there a reason to do anything?” I looked in writing this for an answer.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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

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4

always came incredibly--

 

 

 

from The Great Rotation

a book of poetry by Gregory Botts

 

 

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.

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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

Castle Creek Penstemon, Hummingbird Flowers

Plein air painting.

Plein air painting.

Flashe drawings from the studio

Flashe drawings from the studio

Castle Creek, Hummingbird Flowers #2

Castle Creek, Hummingbird Flowers #2