Gregory Botts, “Gulf at Padre Island” (2012), oil on canvas, 16 x 24 inches

En realidad no hay nada más que naturaleza

Nacido en 1952, vivió su infancia en una zona rural de Pennsylvania, Estados Unidos. Ha estudiado en la School of Visual Arts, en Nueva York, y ha conocido a Joseph Kosuth, entonces uno de los profesores de la SVA, como a otros artistas que han marcado la escena artística nuevayorkina de los anos 70 y 80, como Julian Schnabel. Toda su pintura refleja un dialogo entre la presencia de la tierra y del Sol en su máxima interiorización filosófica, por un lado, y la grande aventura de la abstracción americana. En la entrevista que le ha hecho Jennifer Samet descubrimos a un gran artista de nuestro tiempo que todavía no esta suficientemente incorporado en el teatro de la norma iconoclasta que domina la vanguardia cultural urbana de Nova York.

ACP

Beer with a Painter: Gregory Botts

by Jennifer Samet on February 28, 2015. Hyperallergic

I have known Gregory Botts for about twenty years. Early on, I remember being captivated by the guerilla action he and his wife, fellow painter Jenny Hankwitz, took in the early 1990s: planting sunflowers in the meridian of Houston Street in SoHo. Botts divides his time between New York City and Abiquiu, New Mexico. On his cross-country road trips, he paints landscapes outdoors, and in the studio he incorporates the landscape vocabulary and motifs into larger-scaled, more abstract work. Two of the important writers on Botts’s work are literary critic Harold Bloom and poet David Shapiro. An interest in poetry runs through Botts’s practice, as evidenced in the titles of his paintings and in the volume of his own poetry, which he published as a companion to his visual work, Clouds, Leaves, Waves (1996).

Gregory Botts, ”… the landscape that recurred” (1985), oil on canvas, 120 x 120 inches

Jennifer Samet: You grew up in a rural area in Pennsylvania. Has that landscape played a role in your work? How did you become interested in art-making?

Gregory Botts: I grew up in a small town near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Most people in the community didn’t know what art was, although we had an amazing art teacher in school. My older brother went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh to study graphic design, so I had that example as well.

When I was older, I found out that my father’s father was a musician. He had a big band in the 1920s, but then the Depression hit and he became a church organist and piano teacher for the rest of his life.

I was brought up in a very religious household.  My mother’s father was a minister. I thought that had something to do with why my paternal grandfather was a church organist. But I realized that it was the opposite – he hung out at a place called the White Swan, and got fired by the church for working at the Liquor Control Board.

Somebody told me, as a kid, that I was going to be very unhappy if I asked so many questions. That really set me against religious affiliation. My escape was in nature — running around the woods and in the Susquehanna River all day.

Gregory Botts—Sitio oficial