Portland Gallery is delighted to announce an upcoming exhibition of recent paintings by Nick Botting between 9th to 31st May.

Botting has been exhibiting with Portland for over 20 years and is a firm favourite with collectors.

Botting’s paintings are painting stripped back to its bones – the subject and its painter – without any pretense or artifice. These paintings are the visual reaction of an artist responding to the fleeting world around him through the medium of paint on canvas.

There is a rawness to sitting in front of a subject and making a painting about it which is grounding and immersive, and which speaks directly to anybody who is looking for a sense of reality and presence.

In his painting ‘Chelsea‘ we see interpersonal sociability with three different groups of people in close proximity. Chatting engages our attention, interests and the need to process information. Emotional support is part of the human experience.

Relaxing, consuming nourishment and recreating too.

In a good landscape painting you should be able to tell the temperature and the time of day. So goes the old art dealers’ saying, and it is one that is well worth bearing in mind with Nick Botting’s pictures of London and the English seaside.

When Botting sits in Soho on a summer morning, he paints the edge of the road wet because the street sweeper has been past and the road is still drying; he paints the handyman with a tin of paint and the worker with a sack barrow making deliveries because they were there and give an authentic narrative to the scene.

Amused by the man eating a large cream cake he includes that vignette too. These little happenings make up a particular fleeting scene that comprise a morning in Soho, and their likeness was made by an artist who takes a lot of time to sit and watch and draw the world passing by in front of him.

All these particular and precise moments entertaining us within ‘Maison Bertaux, Monday Morning’, shown above.

Nick Botting paints in all seasons on beaches, in bars and restaurants, in theatres and on the streets. He draws and paints the people and places we are familiar with, and because he does it from life, the changing times are inevitably recorded too.

In his painting ‘The Screen on the Green, Nightfall’ for example (shown immediately above), we see the dramatic contrast between the old and the new London. There is the pastel glow in the sky of an early sunset broken by the neon lights of The Screen on the Green (one of the oldest cinemas in the UK having opened in 1913), while further down the street the warm interior of an Avoman shines out onto the pavement.

The scene is populated by various characters – a woman in the act of dashing across the road, a couple arm-in-arm, and a mother looking at a poster – tiny contributions to the history of things in this corner of London.

These paintings are full of small observations like these which tell us a little about our being here.

ABOUT PORTLAND GALLERY
Portland Gallery was established in 1984 and are leading dealers in modern and contemporary British Art.
Located in St James’s, the gallery is spread over two floors and plays host to 14 exhibitions a year, principally solo presentations of represented artists and estate. The gallery is operated as an Employee Ownership Trust.