Stations Project to be reinstalled at Cathedral 10 Feb through April 2015 .

Stations Video

Opening Reception 10 March 2011

Installation Photos of The Stations Project

A Vision of the American Sublime
by Harold Bloom

Gregory Botts begins his statement by quoting from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself; "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." He rightly associates Whitman with his other poetic hero, Wallace Stevens, and cites the later poet's vision of the American Sublime. 

Whitman himself throughout his poetry sees himself as an American Christ and affirms that he hoped to write a new Bible for Americans. I myself in my endless broodings on what I have learned to call the American Religion have thought of Whitman together with the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith as the two grand American instances of religion-making. Botts intuitively understands that Whitman sees himself as replacing Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas, while not so much displacing Christ as Americanizing him.

Though Botts as a painter derives more immediately from the generation of Jackson Pollock, his ultimate precursors are Piero della Francesca, Giotto and Mantegna. His Stations of the Cross for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine are profoundly Whitmanian but also return us to something of the hard power of the great Italian masters of fresco. 

Botts has always been a painter inspired by the wind, the sun, and the four seasons. His imagery of clouds, leaves, and waves derives from the tradition that passes from Shelley to Whitman and then on to Wallace Stevens. In his visions of the Stations of the Cross the fused figure of Walt Whitman and Jesus is seen as ascending much more than as falling. The imagery of Botts's paintings is never as abstract as first it seems to be. Whitman's obsession with reeds and all the other growth at the water-edge is amplified throughout Botts. 

Walt Whitman invented the poetic genre we can call the Shore Ode, which was developed powerfully by so many he influenced. Among these I would cite T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt and many other strong poets. It seems to me that Botts achieves a visual sibling to the American Shore Ode in his Stations. 

If you frame his Stations project by the Whitmanian tradition in American poetry, a considerable insight into his method and aim becomes available. Whitman as the prophet of the American Religion refuses to acknowledge that we live in a fallen universe, or perhaps we can say that for him as for the ancient Gnostics the Creation and the Fall are the same event. Like the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and like Whitman's master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, this poetic vision explicitly declares that what is best and oldest in us goes back to before the Creation-Fall. 

Throughout the Stations as created by Botts, I am made aware of the tragic undersong that triumphs poetically in Whitman's great dirges, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking and the even darker As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life. The severe, hard lines favored by Botts go beyond his heritage of Action painting and enter an area for which we as yet have few defining terms. One of his closer ancestors, Barnett Newman, is undoubtedly an influence upon Botts here. 

Hart Crane, who in many respects was the culmination of the Whitmanian tradition, and who seems to me our major unchurched poet of the American Religion, based his epic The Bridge on Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Botts himself is a deep reader of Hart Crane as of Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens. He is haunted by Walt's identification with Christ in section 38 of Song of Myself:

That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.

I remember now,
I resume the overstaid fraction,
The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,
Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.

I troop forth replenish'd with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,
Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,
Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,
The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years. 

Whitman's triumphant resurrection flowers into a vast procession of Americans. Walt's power was caught forever in a magnificent tribute by Wallace Stevens:

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

This heroic singer is at once a new Moses and a new Aaron, and both fuse as an American Christ. Having known Botts for many years, I am aware that this chant is always in his mind and heart. I am immensely moved by his Stations of the Cross because they culminate much in his own career as a celebrator of the American Sublime. 

Installed February 2011

Stations Project

Artist Statement

As I sat down to write, the phrase "I am the man, I was there, I suffered." came to mind. That man seemed to be Achilles, Odysseus, maybe Aeneas, or Christ. These figures mirror feelings it seems we harbor in our lives. The words above were written by Walt Whitman. I have also been fascinated by Wallace Steven's critical description of the Hero as in his poem, "How does one stand To behold the sublime, To confront the mockers, The mickey mockers..." These thoughts contain pathos, they have created our literature, they create the hero that creates our selves.

I went to Italy to see the Frescos of the early Renaissance in 1972 when an art student at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. I came back naively thinking that I wanted to do just that, make the National Epic. I loved the flat, hard, modern surface of Piero della Francesca, Giotto and Mantegna. The figure and the narrative, had been out of fashion in art for some time. I soon understood the reasons and felt similar. It stayed in the back of my mind.








I went back to the landscape for itself. It was not long before I realized that any particular thing focused upon became a kind of figure or idea of that landscape space. This seemed an image of what a thought was in the mind. The grasping of the idea seemed a going back into the reeds to retrieve the figure. I put this forth as a metaphor for the idea as well as for painting itself. I equated the making of a figure with this idea and in my paintings put a line around the figure to formally distinguish it from the deeper space as it achieved the surface. The fitting together of this content or idea along with it's form or figure became the predominate idea my work.

At first I worked in a more abstract manner, using the forms of abstract expressionism. It was apparent to me how figurative these abstract forms were and I had no problem restoring the contents I felt necessary for art to continue. Later my juxtaposition of differing painting styles side by side, of figure and abstraction coinciding, made the puzzle of images and thoughts I was pursuing. I saw a moment's truth evolving into continually changing feelings or beliefs. I began to see a revolving reality cycling from one ending becoming new beginnings.












In the last series of paintings I completed, Paumanok Reeds, I retain a feeling for the particular place. It is the poetic bay beach of Long Island. Paumanok, is the Indian name Whitman used meaning "fish shaped island." The reeds are the thing which stands out as I paint there each year. The reeds contain crickets that sing in a way lending a mystery to the place which as I would paint pointed to the greater mix of reality itself. In the last juxtaposition of paintings the figure seemed to peer into these reeds, into that mystery they share with the stars, with reality itself. In the fragmented works he seems to now fall into that difficulty or impossibility of understanding.

I realized this idea long ago, in the painting of a landscape out of doors. This activity led me to see how everything really is, constantly changing . The wind, the sun and season. The clouds, leaves, waves, passing became a symbol and image of this reality to me.





These ideas extend from the figural content of the Hero to the form of the more abstract Stations. I thought of Christ's fall and getting back up; 1, 2, 3, times, part of this revolving reality. The thoughts, moments, segments of a life measured, the marking, making a description a formal representation of this passion.

Framing the Stations Project

There is a propelling forward, yet a containment of motion.

New Blue Stain

I decided I wanted the blue squares to be lighter, so I used a light blue gesso let it dry and then a oil stain on top.

A Note on The Stations of the Cross by Gregory Botts Carter Ratcliff

A Note on The Stations of

the Cross by Gregory Botts

Carter Ratcliff

In 2011, Gregory Botts completed a group of fourteen paintings. Medium-size

and rendered in tones of black, white, and gray, these canvases can be seen as

abstractions — and dazzling despite their somber palette. Diagonals inflect right

angles, right angles modulate curves, curves enter into complex negotiations

with one another. We could stop here, with a contemplation of the power — and

the subtlety — of these forms considered purely as forms. This would be a bit

disingenuous, however, for Botts fills his paintings with recognizable things. There

are hieroglyphic indications of reeds and trees, intimations of mountains and cloudfilled

skies, and forms we decipher as parts of the human body: legs, a head covered

with a wide-brimmed hat, an entire torso. These fourteen paintings show a person

traversing a landscape.

I pointed to their strength as abstractions not only because this strength is formidable

but also because it is crucial to the artist’s purpose. Without their formal brilliance,

these paintings would have no hope of standing up under the pressures brought to

bear by interpretation. Entitling them Stations of the Cross, Botts challenges us to

understand them in three intertwined ways: as purely pictorial, as subtly referential,

and — the most demanding — as transcendently spiritual. Traversing a border region

between the abstract and the figurative, Botts’s Stations grapple with a theme

that has been central to the Western tradition since the late Middles Ages — the Via

Dolorosa or Way of Sorrows that brought Jesus to crucifixion and death. The somber

palette of Botts’s series deliberately recalls the Stations of the Cross that Barnett

Newman painted in 1958-66, using only black and white and the color of unprimed

canvas. For Newman and his generation, which included Jackson Pollock and Mark

Rothko, abstraction was something like a moral imperative. They dispensed with

narrative, as well. Newman said that the fourteen canvases comprising his Stations

did not represent a progression, as in traditional renderings, which begin with Jesus

condemned to death and end with him laid in the tomb. Rather, Newman intended

each canvas to evoke, in its own register, the moment when Jesus cried out, “Lema

Sabachthani?” “Oh, Lord, why have you forsaken me?”

In 1950, Henri Matisse painted a version of the Stations in a chapel in Vence, a

small town in the south of France. Though the fourteen stages of the Via Dolorosa

can be distinguished — in fact, they are numbered — Matisse clustered his images on

a large wall, producing a composition that encourages us to see it in full in a single

moment. Like Newman, Matisse worked against narrative. Their disinclination to

tell stories is nearly all these two artists have in common, yet it forms a strong bond.

For all their differences, Matisse and Newman shared the modernist tradition, which

emerged, in part, from a rejection of storytelling. A proper modernist painting inhabits

an absolute now, a moment of time outside of time.

Impatient with proprieties, Botts does not want to exclude anything from

painting — not the figure, not landscape, and certainly not narrative or the poetry

that gives us our most enduring stories, legends, and myths. In a statement

accompanying his Stations, Botts quotes a line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of

Myself”: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” Newman, too, invokes this man,

the one who asks God why, having created me, have you abandoned me to this

suffering? His Stations of the Cross are a tragic lament. Botts’s Stations invite

us to feel in concert with the individual struggling to traverse a landscape that is

formless, perhaps annihilating, until it is shaped by those very struggles. Though

Botts does not deny suffering, the mode of his art is less tragic than heroic. He

imagines Whitman’s man as “Achilles, Odysseus, maybe Aeneas, or Christ.” Or as

Whitman himself, the archetypal American pilgrim, whose pilgrimage is a life-long

act of creation.

An act that begins, for a painter, with a mark on a blank surface — a gesture in

a void — and continues until the successive marks, in their variety, arrive at

coherence. Intelligibility. Meaning. And yet, no matter how convincing any one

painting may be, its meaning is partial. There is more to be said or, better, more

to be done, and so the artist continues through the landscape of possibility, as

in Botts’s Station of the Cross.

In his first Station, a bar of dark blue runs along the left-hand edge of the canvas.

This blue geometry — the series’ only departure from the range of black, white,

and gray — reappears in some but not all of the other Stations. Its shape and

position changes, and then, in the last painting, this abstract shape settles along

the right-hand edge, as if it, too, has completed a pilgrimage. Reading a heroic

motive into this migrating shape, we achieve a full sense of these artworks, their

power to integrate form, image, and epic theme. Moreover, we arrive at a sense

our own imaginative powers. We share in the artist’s sense of transcendent

possibility. We become, if only temporarily, incarnations of his heroic protagonist.

Drawings

Second stage of Oil Paint

Its hard to tell in these pictures but they have been all repainted in oil, adjustments made and I'll probably go with this. I remade Stations 6 and 10 to make more of a movement and add to the tumbling effect.