2008 Painting Blog

I paint, along the road, each year out west, on my way to various teaching jobs in California, New Mexico and Colorado.

These road paintings are my raw material and they usually lead me somewhere in my studio painting each winter, back on the Brooklyn waterfront.


I had called the process, "The Western Jaunt", back in the 1990's when I traveled, after Walt Whitman's "Open Road" idea. There was something of the sacred, idea, in that search, after Harold Bloom and Emerson's idea of mirroring what we see as "what is best and oldest in our selves".

Today the more profane, idea, of "Road Movie" and "On the Road" pervades this travel. It is the juxtaposition of the two which interests me these days.

I am alone there much of the time, and so much goes unnoticed. So here it goes-- let me know what you think.


There is a website at http://www.gregorybotts.com/ with Studio paintings, Gallery information, and Archives of work.



Below are posts of the first leg of my journey. I will be returning to New Mexico next week through Big Sur and Yosemite.

Starting out in New Mexico

I saw a great Maynard Dixon Painting of the Pedernal, at a gallery in Santa Fe.

The Pedernal is a flat topped mountain that Georgia O'Keeffe painted over and over during her life. This painting was made in 1931 when Maynard spent, with his then wife Dorthea Lange, about 8 months painting in NM and around Taos.

It reminded me of a Hopper painting I knew and I walked down to the book store and saw Hopper had painted a very similar painting of Cape Cod the same year. Dixon would have been aware of these paintings, I think.

I say all of this as Dixon is such a good western painter because his form is molded from eastern tradition which is linked to the larger European.

Most painter's out West come in on the larger painting conversation in the middle and don't really know the voices. Maynard is talking to Hopper, and the early Modernists, though he mainly is true to the landscape in front of him-- through them.

New Mexican Clouds

The clouds in New Mexico make the landscape and I have to say after everywhere I've been in the last three weeks it is really just amazing here.

It's 11:00 and like every day in July and August the day starts out with a blue sky. A little peek of cloud comes up over the mountains and as the day progresses to a thundershower, here or there, rarely more than a half hour or so, and cooling everything off-- the clouds, start to disipate soon after, and as a result the sunsets are usually just the squiggles of the remaining clouds.




The night is cool almost cold as the thin air retains no heat, and the abundant stars. Well, thats the sky in New Mexico. Because of the dramatic red rocky landscape, dotted with Pine and Juniper, the sun picking over the hillsides, that intensest sun at 7,000 feet, again-- just amazing, and as I said before, the word Sublime, is as one can never remember the beauty as it is just beyond the scope of the mind.

So my paltry attempt at reality, well, it's something else really. It is the stimulis, following the drama of the light-- I never really capture, don't really try for, although I paint fast trying to keep up-- I paint what I see, so the affects only last minutes.



I really went off on some guy today, looking like Colonel Sanders in the desert, goatee and cowboy hat-- I was way out beyond the road, and he drove way over-- to talk I guess, and I yelled-- couldnt he see-- I was trying to catch this all, it would all be gone-- it was--

Sun and Clouds, New Mexico

This is something I paint almost every year, the sunflowers-- when they first arrive. Today the clouds came up beautiful as expected and I decided to paint them.



I had these sunflowers I picked last evening and later in the day, when the paint was just set a bit, I painted them on top.



I don't think these sunflowers are native, though they sure seem perfect here, in the clouds and red earth.