JANE BOOTH
NEW PAINTINGS
MAY 2 — JUNE 13, 2008
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Jane Booth’s work emerges from her dedication to the landscape of her
physical environment—rural Kansas—and the landscape of her interior life.
Consequently her work has a diaristic and dreamlike effect, suggesting the
rich interior life that we may access when we connect to that portion of our
psyche. By painting in an abstract style that is still dependent on a certain
naturalism, Booth mines the rich veins of formalism and conceptualism.
Physically Booth’s works are abstract, dynamic, and color saturated. She
often incorporates passages of an earthy, lyrical graffiti in her paintings. Filled
with passages of forms that often seem to emerge from a hazy background,
these abstract shapes sometimes suggest some pictorial language we may
or may not be able to decode. In the large scale Bird Songs, Booth paints
swatches of white and blue strokes that mimic graffiti tags, albeit in a rougher
and less stylized manner. Their placement suggests letters and textual forms,
yet in the end don’t add up to a true text. Instead, the scratches and swaths
of color may suggest, as does the work’s title, the aural pattern of bird songs.
How these random songs or notes may imprint on our brains and impact
our senses seems to be embedded in Booth’s abstract marks.
Booth’s painting practice that often focuses on monumentally scaled works
is a conscious decision to draw the viewer into an enveloping visual and
emotional field. While not a strict color field painter, her work does suggest
the kind of visual experience that works by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko,
Helen Frankenthaler and others provided. Working with unprimed canvas,
Booth layers color stains, building a base of saturated hues. She notes,
“The way color stains lay on top of unprimed canvas is a never- ending
source of awe. There’s no way to find the same colors by mixing before
applying to canvas; deep red underneath yellow is so different from
orange. The canvas starts on the floor and thinned paint is pushed into
it. There’s always an uncontrolled part of the process that has to be
worked with. Eventually the canvas is tacked on the wall to work more
opaque marks with paint, pencil, or pastels.”
Those layers of stain create a luminous quality in the paintings. Comparisons
to Frankenthaler or Morris Louis are inevitable as both artists stained
unprimed canvas as well, manipulating their pouring techniques, yet allowing
the paint to enjoy some autonomy.
Mid Season Dream suggests Booth’s affinity for Surrealism and her interior,
emotional landscape. Here, dreamy purples and blues melt into one another
suggesting a haze from which emerge abstracted shapes and forms. Small
circles and larger dashes of color indicate some kind of presence. It is
indeterminate if that presence is natural, supernatural, or somewhere in
between. That the work slightly mirrors an actual landscape (we may imagine
a densely foggy early morning on the plains) ties the painting to Booth’s dual
devotion to interior and exterior spaces. Booth is philosophical kin to author
and essayist William Gass in her deep connection to the power of color to
excite us to emotional and intellectual connections. In his seminal book On
Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry Gass wrote,
“So—in short—color is consciousness itself, color is feeling, and shape
is the distance color goes securely, as in our life we extend ourselves
through neighborhoods and hunting groups; while form in its turn is the
relation of these inhabited spaces, in or out or up or down, and thrives
on the difference between kitchen and pantry. This difference, with all
its sameness, is yet another quality, alive in time like the stickiness of
honey or the gently rough lap of the cat, for color is connection. Praise
is due blue, the preference of the bee.”
As if to highlight Gass’s passage, Booth’s painting Tibet is a monumental,
glowing and pulsating field of yellows, pinks, and oranges. Exposed and
expansive, the broadly swept color washes seem open to our various
interpretations and responses. Because the painting is so exposed, with large
areas of color washes, Booth seems to invite the viewer into the center of the
painting’s emotional and physical pull. Conversely, the tightly and aggressively
mannered Triptych—Monday Tuesday Wednesday suggests an inward bound
emotional territory for the artist and her viewers. The painting is densely
packed with scratches and scrabbles of paint, and active mark making. Booth
layers aggressive marks across the expanse of the canvas; creating a barrier to
entry, unlike the open Tibet that invites the viewer to visually and emotionally
enter the painting.
Of Triptych—Monday Tuesday Wednesday, Booth writes that it
“was painted in a time of growth, painful, confusing, complex, many
things shifting and moving in my life. No expansive open view here.
Tied up and knotted in places, but also overall gracefully changing
unfolding and moving as things always, always do. When I look at it I
can see a literal landscape of sorts—maybe wooded, tangled, thick,
but more to the point it looks like how life felt to me at the time.”
Along with Bird Songs, this work is one of Booth’s most energetic and
engaging. It is also her darkest work, the multiple and beautifully textured
and colored layers implying myriad states of mind and states of being. The
narrative title indicating time’s passage may indicate that this gloomy period
was longer lasting than most, perhaps longer than desired.
Booth achieves a soothing effect in Shadows on the Grass. Here, the orangishreddish
space—sunrise or sunset—is punctuated by a couple of brilliant
blue strokes and some subtle lines and marks. Less suggestive of a horizon
line than Mid Season Dream, the work still may invoke the expanse of Kansas;
certainly the title implies the land.
Jane Booth operates in the binaries of inside and outside, actual life and
dream life. Through her beautifully color-saturated canvases Booth examines
the mysteries of an emotional and physical life in which her gestures, ideas,
and colors cross-pollinate to suggest newer and even more expansive
conceptual and abstract territory.
— Dana Self, independent curator and writer, Kansas City, MO
Notes
Artist quotes from email exchange with the author.
Gass quote from William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry,
(Boston, MA: Nonpareil Books, 1991), p. 73.
All images by Jane Booth, acrylic on canvas and courtesy of the artist.
pictured above: Triptych—Monday Tuesday Wednesday, 72x144 inches, 2006
pictured below: Tibet, 76x132 inches, 2008
bottom image: Bird Songs-detail, 72x180 inches, 2003
pictured above: Shadows On The Grass, 48x64 inches, 2007
J A N E B O O T H R É S U M É
C O R P O R A T E C O L L E C T I O N S
BlueCross BlueShield, Kansas City, MO
BNIM Architects, Kansas City, MO
CBIZ Benefits & Insurance Inc., Leawood, KS
Cisco Systems Inc., Shawnee Mission, KS
Country Club Bank, Kansas City, MO
Fleishmann-Hillard International Communications, Kansas City, MO
H&R Block World Headquarters, Kansas City, MO
H&R Block Financial Advisors, Detroit, MI
Hilton Hotel, Washington D.C.
Lathrop & Gage Law Offices, Kansas City, MO
S O L O E X H I B I T I O N S
Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, MO 2008
Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City, MO 2007
Leopold Galler y, Kansas City, MO 2007
Watson Galler y, Salina, KS 2007
Hyde Galler y, Springfield, MO 2007
Edesia, Manhattan, KS 2007
Hallar Galler y, Kansas City, MO 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003
Prairiebrooke Galler y, Overland Park, KS 2006
Strecker-Nelson Galler y, Manhattan, KS 2004
State Capitol Building, Governor Sebelius, Topeka, KS 2004
A W A R D S , H O N O R S A N D P U B L I C A T I O N S
American Art Collector Book: 2006, 2007
Kansas Masters Invitational 2007
Governor’s 2007 Inaugural Book: Notable Kansas Artists
American Art Collector Book: 2006
River Market Regional Exhibition Award Winner 2005
front cover image: Mid Season Dream, 44x32 inches, 2008
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
Support for ARTISTS PAGES has been provided by The Francis Families Foundation.
Additional assistance has been provided by Estelle S. and Robert A. Long Ellis Foundation, Mallin/Gibson Family, Lighton Fund, the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency, and the Artists Coalition’s patrons and members.
© 2008 by the Kansas City Artists Coalition. All rights reserved.