2003 Aspen "A Rustling in the Woods" 2

2003 Aspen "A Rustling in the Woods"

2000 Madrid Paintings

The Madrid Paintings were painted in a barn in Madrid, New Mexico. I made paintings in 1986 and 1987 that refered to Goya and I liked this name Madrid, even though in New Mexico it is pronounced Mad--rid, stress on the first syllable.



Here at the end of one century and the beginning of the next I was going over all the moves I'd made , trying to put them all in one painting.



They stand up well, and I will revisit them. Again, as in the past they are a symbolic tightening of the themes I've used.

1999 New Mexico

In the many times I've driven across country, New Mexico is where I always stopped.

In 1998 I stayed for a time at an artist's house that was an old friend. I ended up staying awhile.



I found this would be my new place away from my NYC home, which had been Long Island in my earlier days.

I bought a piece of land and soon I built a studio the size of the one I'd lost in NY.






These paintings harked back to the Western Jaunt and I think of them as continuing it.

1998 Comic Sublime

I was at St Marks Church on New Years 1998 and heard the term comic sublime used in a poem.







I was making drawings as I listened all day to the poetry marathon they have. The elongated dimension was thinking about a painting as an altarpiece.

I tried to make these formal again simplifying every thing.

1997 Joshua Tree

I was asked to participate in the Joshua Tree National Park Artist Residency.

I was given a old ranger station 15 miles off the beaten track.

The comet Haley Boop was in the sky and I would paint into the evening as it appeared.

It was such an amazing experience that I continued to paint the landscape up to this day.






Tim Terrell at Joshua Tree had a real passion to get this one off the ground.

1996 Clouds, leaves, waves.

Clouds, leaves, waves was published in 1996. It was published by Jon Rabinowitz of Turtle Point Press, NY.

A forward was written by Harold Bloom.


Here

from the forward:


A surface hardened by repetition
becoming by shade
meaning less, distanced like Art.

That seems to me an epitome of Clouds, Leaves, Waves: always
haunted by the great presence of Stevens, this Notebook hovers
between Botts’s paintings and Stevens’s poems, trying to perform an
impossible but poignant labor of mediation. What Stevens called “the
fiction of the leaves” goes back as far as Homer and the Bible, but
seems to have taken its decisive turn, for Stevens, in Shelley’s “Ode to
the West Wind,” which is the direct source of Botts’s title, Clouds,
Leaves, Waves. When Shelley cried out to the wind, asking it to lift
him as a cloud, a leaf, a wave, he consciously and despairingly reduced
himself to object-status. There is much of Shelley’s Lucretian
skepticism in Stevens (as there was in the Epicurean Whitman), but
Botts clearly responds not so much to this but rather to what Emerson
calls the Optative Mood of American Romantic tradition. There is, to
be sure, much darkness in Botts’s Clouds, Leaves, Waves, but the
larger impression, as in his paintings, is one of affirmation. As
throughout American Romantic tradition, this is a highly qualified
affirmation, but that is not an affirmed qualification.

1994 Long Island Fragments 2

1995 was my last summer spent in Long Island.








from Clouds, leaves, waves.

Crispin wandering off
abstractly, --singing
a different song,
centuries flashing before us
dying, the arm of the sublime
coming down, from high noon.

The fall comedian,
hails the winter in the city.

Haunting memories of
Pompeii, in the sun,
(a certain quality of a special red
pigment fading)
reminds
our loss of the sacred.
Spirit, a quality-- felt--
unmeasured,
underneath, abstracting,
flaking paint, a grey grid
restored, then disintegrating--
fragmented broken pieces.

The hardened crystal, signaling
a Supreme Fiction!
drifting, beyond reach or grasp.

things as they are





Large paintings were becoming problematic. Seen as the eighties commercial machine. These were the first smaller paintings I made as a years work.

It was hard not to feel my ambition was waning . So I hung them as walls. They looked great all together! They gave another dimension to my symbolic narrative or cycle.



Mythos I found had a root in the Greek that means seasonal.

1994 Long Island Fragments

I had been staying out in Napeague Long Island. They prices for rentals was now out of reach and the traffic made one wonder if one wanted to be there any more.

The end of this wonderful place for me seemed near.




I was still making my stillifes by the bay beach and these grew out of them.

I had painted "...leaving Long Island." the year before.




Painting seemed hooked to this progress and it seemed I was going out of fashion.

Just when I had a cycle of paintings. It seemed Easthampton was a little like Pompeii
was to Rome.

1993 Yosemite Paintings

1993 Big Sur, "...end of distances." 2

Yosemite and Big Sur were a group of paintings, together that were exhibited at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in September 1993.

Here are some that were not in the show.

1993 Paintings of Big Sur, the Pacific Ocean

But where is what I started for, so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?

The words of Walt Whitman who never saw this Pacific Ocean.

1994 Western Fragments

I continued making the out of doors paintings and making them large in my studio.

I thought of the black and white drawing underneath them as their subconscious. I wanted to expose it as an integral part, and reference to my eighties work.

The fragment was the result. The fragmentation allows for the cycle to happen and for me a kind of evolution.

There was a submerged narrative of birds replacing flowers as quest objects. I made a heirarchy of these the Western Tanager at top, and the Jays as a jangling in the mind Stevens often uses.

At one point I had seen a Western Tanager fly out into the sun.















from Clouds, leaves, waves.


Driving back to camp
high in mountains, roadways
nearing the tops of pines--
a Western Tanager, unconcerned,
flashes in the waning sun,
snagging a fly...
a merging of Imagination
and things as they are--

tired, making a way to camp.
Trying to figure, the pines in shadows,
dancing in the fire’s light,
amongst icy cold frightening stars,
curling down and away
inside a down bag, retaining a warmth.

1993 Western Jaunt

Western Jaunt was a title I found in Whitman. I always worried a bit using it as it sounds a little casual.

But the feelings were so heavy at the time, as the Anne Plumb Gallery closed in SoHo and art moved on to Chelsea.

I was asked to teach in California and I took off. I had my paint and started to paint along the road.

I visited most of the National Parks and found I liked the feeling that would come over me of "Wow, I have to paint that!









I blew up the plein air paintings in my studio and they became more abstract, simplifying the shape and color.














My figure was easily super imposed and I thought of it in terms of eighties overlay. I still thought of Greek Vases and how contemporary they were. The landscape becomes very positive in the negative shapes of the flattened figures.











I sent some pictures around and Tony Shafrazi who I had worked for in the Keith Haring days really liked them. We had a show of them the next September.



This painting below was painted on the spot at Yosemite. I then later made a large version in Brooklyn.

1992 Villa of the Sun 3

I go back and forth between abstract and more narrative modes. Actually I like an idea put forth by Frye of the literary modes as equaling the seasonal mythos. I built a abstract figure out of the Emersonian combination of, Fate, Freedom, and Power. I saw their correspondence in the Seasons; Fate, Winter and so on.

Stevens had a similar figure in what he called Major Man, a man containing the differing poles of Summer Ideal and Romantic Winter.











I think the Met had just bought a Duccio around this time and I was thinking of the Italian Altar pieces, along with the Roman wall painting I like at the Villa of the Mysteries.

1992 Villa of the Sun 2

A Postcard from the Volcano
by Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

1992 Villa of the Sun

Sunflowers heightened, and broken pieces of flaking wall fragmented and deepened the whole.





The fragmented wall exposed the drawing pentimento beneath. The Sunflowers were heightened by diamonds that I liked as they alluded to commedia del arte and Cezzane's figure of Pierrot, and the parallel heightening of Tibetan art, relating to the sun.