INTRODUCING OUR EXCITING NEW ARTIST
A kindred spirit, contemporary artist Helen Booth has always been fascinated by nature, especially its repetitive patterns. Her intricate mark-making and stripped-back palette are inspired by the winter light of her Welsh home and the dramatic landscape she encountered during a residency in Iceland.
She says: “My recent work directly responds to my time spent creating work in sub-zero temperatures in Iceland. Working in graphite, charcoal and liquid inks without gloves at -20 degrees forced me to distil my marks into their purest forms whilst still retaining my emotional reaction to what I was experiencing as an artist.
“Standing at the foot of frozen waterfalls, glaciers containing air bubbles from thousands of years ago and within vast expanses of white snow planes on the Sandur, with no evidence of humanity, was like stepping out of the physical and into the intangible. This new body of work presents my emotional response to my fear of Iceland's extreme conditions, subtle colours, the quality of winter light, and boundless dark skies.”
THE ART OF THE SUBLIME
Her large-scale abstract paintings are not only ambitious in size but subject, asking questions of the sublime, beauty and universal themes such as love, life and death.
She applies layers upon layers of oil paint, using gravity and the natural behaviour of paint to build up the surface until the painting teeters on the edge of destruction, and then excavates.
She says: “As an artist, I am on a continual quest to explore the connection between the inner and outer landscape. Each painting is part of a larger continuum firmly rooted in nature and the sublime.”
