Power Boothe’s Instinct

Lyn Horton
November 2018

Untethered, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in.
image courtesy of Fred Giampietro Gallery

Power Boothe: The New Geometry
Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, CT.
October 13, 2018 through November 9, 2018

In the vast complex network of communication utilized by all living things in the known world, a niche of human beings calling themselves artists strives in its own anthropomorphic way to carve out its place within that network. The measure of how an artist can communicate can be how long a viewer can linger with that artist’s work and never get tired of looking.

Given this perspective, Power Boothe’s oil paintings resonate with an outpouring of skill and willingness to communicate in a language that resides within quintessential imperfect humanity.

At first sight, the imagery, within the frames that naturally impose limits on it, seems mechanistic, formalized, and distant. When, in fact, it pops with a reserved unassailable energy that defines its content as handmade, instinctual, engaging and embracing.

Double Axis, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in.
image courtesy of Fred Giampietro Gallery

Upon examination of the spectrum of his work, one can observe that Boothe does what he needs to do in order to discover what will follow. He has been dubbed a geometric abstractionist, in contrast to how his work truly manifests itself. His process is simultaneously logical and intuitive in order to convey a concept that is more far-reaching than the result that arises from adhering to rigid systems to build a painting. Although he uses the visual tools that address geometry with straight-edged lines, ellipses, and lines that touch to produce angles and rectilinear shapes, what is unseen, that is, what is absent or painted over, also targets the viewer with the most poignant, joyous, and melancholic indicators.

The paintings present themselves as rows on top of rows of squares, divided up at angles that have to stay within the borders of the larger shape, which is the entire surface of the painting, no matter its size. And all these lines, painted with a tentative certainty, dance across the canvas, in varying colors both opaque and transparent, decided upon no doubt to complement each other (as in the color wheel). They move across and interrupt the pavement of thickly brushed on or scraped off paint.  When there is no line, a synaptic thrust moves the eye to find the next landing. If one were to trace the movements of the viewer’s eyes, the picture might be quite different. Looking at the paintings forces their gridded-ness to disappear. The formulaic nature of the layering that has made the painting flies away. The skeleton that gives placement to the lines has been overlaid with muscles and circulatory systems and breathing.

The surface tension created through the interplay of marks and strokes implies an infinite number of imaginary maps sprung from the well-charted one initially stated on the canvas. These perceptual maps are always complete because the painting is complete. Nothing is left to chance except in the actual painting of the painting.  How choices are made, as if by chance, really happens in relation to what already exists is in the eyes, hands and mind of the artist.

A re-reading of Boothe’s lines and shapes seems to expose sets of organized pictographs, repeatedly scattered from border to border of the frame where the potential for interpretation is replaced by some effervescent, evanescent song, perhaps the running of a stream, the scurrying of the birds, how the breeze causes the leaves to whisper. Or the sound of people talking or of a violin being bowed slowly or a high pitch produced by the vibration of the double-reed oboe.  Or of crowds, parties, pointed discussions, lectures, quiet ramblings. Or of orchestras, musical ensembles, piano soloists playing Satie.

Initial Conditions, 2018, detail, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in.
image courtesy of Fred Giampietro Gallery

Boothe’s art lies on the edge of duality. Even though studying his paintings reveals halves and quarters and eighths and irregular shapes, the thises and the thats never separate. Rather they multiply. They converge into one entity, subject to time and the eternal. The edge he teeters on requires a focus that is so sharp that doing anything other than what he has done means that another visual decision has been made and carried out.

Boothe quotes the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus:

“Everything flows, nothing remains.”

Boothe’s paintings say:

This is how I do.

This is how I want to know.

This is how I do know.

This is how I do not know.

This is how I might know can be seen at this moment in this place.

This is how I point to how someone else can know, how one’s senses can be tapped, how one’s path can be illuminated, how one’s purpose can defined.

Whatever evidence the viewer derives in Boothe’s paintings of his process is probably there.

Up, Down, Across, 2018, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in.
image courtesy of Fred Giampietro Gallery

Boothe’s history is deep. His works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

His teaching encompasses an extensive range. On his website is written: Boothe is currently Professor of Painting at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford. He served as Dean of the Hartford Art School from 2001 to 2010, where he led a successful campaign to build the Renée Samuels Center, a studio facility focused on teaching art and technology. As Director of the School of Art at Ohio University from 1998 to 2001, he produced a symposium on cognitive theory and the arts: Art/Body/Mind. As Co-director of the Mount Royal Graduate School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1993 to 1998, he curated the exhibition, Art + Necessity. The Maryland Institute awarded him the Trustees Award for Teaching Excellence in 1998. Boothe served as Lecturer in the Humanities at Princeton University from 1988–1994 and served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts from 1979 -1988.

No task intrudes on his art-making. Teaching and working in his studio, according to Boothe, run in “parallel universes.” His attention is riveted and unbending. All the while wide and unrelenting.

“When I am stuck, I walk outside and into the woods, or even when I am not stuck. When I go back to the studio, it is amazing how I am then able to see whatever is going on in my studio more clearly. It is always important to remember the astonishing complexity of the woods, filled with the rich integration of life and non-life in all its forms.”

The utter wealth derived from his awareness of the world falls into his paintings purposely without hesitation. An assembly of his paintings all in one space only reinforces that.

These paintings are not thrown together. They are innate extensions of a mind whose development will never cease for any reason at any time.

How Boothe’s paintings defy translation elevates them to a level that surpasses their “thingness.”

These paintings communicate a speechless language. An evocative language. A language understood in the experience of it. Over and over again. There on the mostly square canvases, some small, some large. There on the canvases, hanging on the wall.

Power Boothe/Jonathan Waters, opening reception
image courtesy of Fred Giampietro Gallery

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Lyn Horton has been an artist for over forty years dedicated to maintaining a whole life experience now more than ever. She has a long history writing about creative improvised music for well-known publications, reviewing recordings, interviewing musicians and composing editorials. She has exhibited her art work extensively and is represented by the Cross MacKenzie Gallery in Washington, D.C. Horton was commissioned in 2012 to do a piece for the US Embassy in Vientiane, Laos. Her photography can be seen on Instagram.

Read other articles by Lyn Horton on Arteidolia