John
Booth
Acrylics 2 of 3
Acrylics
The practical difficulties of oil painting on the spot drew John Booth towards working with acrylics. He was impressed by the early acrylics of David Hockney, which he saw at Tate Britain in the sixties. As a medium he feels that acrylics have all the weight of a painting in oils: strong impasto is a possibility as well as delicate washes.
He prefers to paint on the spot. He identifies with John Ruskin's remark: 'There is nothing that I can tell you with more earnest desire that you should believe than this - that you will never love art well till you love what she mirrors better.'
His feeling is that working in the studio the artist is tempted to rely too much on photographs and that the marks he makes can become too concerned with their abstract aesthetic qualities. Painting on the spot the artist does not have time for these considerations. He is too concerned with addressing the problems that he has set himself in recording what is in front of him. Inevitably the abstract qualities will be present but they will be unselfconsciously produced in the production of the work.
Still in his sixties, he would, at the end, want to be able to echo the writer and poet Walter Landor's lines which he wrote on his seventy fourth birthday:
'Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art;
I warm'd both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks and I am ready to depart.'
