Blue Shop Gallery presents
BOOTHRIGHT AND BOON
A back-to-back show
Boothright: 9 - 16 Feb 23 : 'Just out of reach'
Boon: 18 - 26 Feb 23 : 'Purge'
Wednesday - Sunday | 11am - 6pm
PV's 8th Feb 6-9pm & 18th Feb 5-8pm
Artists talk 3pm Saturday 18th Feb
RSVP hello@blueshopcottage.com
Our second exhibition of 2023 brings together two solo shows back-to-back by a pair of young artists from Camberwell College of Arts. Charlie Boothright and Archie Boon are two incredibly exciting painters at the edge of their careers. For our show poster Oliver Wade, their close friend and fellow art student, captures their lives, artistic process and creative output in his numerous black and white film photographs. The paintings in this show are urgent, loud and passionate. Wade's documentary photographs echo both the physicality of Boothright and Boon's work, but also the energy and confidence of the pair as artists.
We first met them at Blue Shop Cottage in 2020 whilst they were in their first year of art school and now, three years later, we are proud to present their invigorating and energetic bodies of work on our brand new walls.
We have captured Boothright and Boon before the other powers at play affect the art, and the artist. Only the earliest bodies of artistic work retain the vitality of nascent artistic investigation and questioning. We are documenting the birth of brilliance, the birth of the painter.
Whilst there is a distinct conversation between the two bodies of works, they are separated by their approach to the canvas. Boothright's paintings force us into a primal, terrestrial world; we feel the child-like energy of fingers ripping through mud, trying to find form and magic in earth, but handled technically and compositionally with maturity way past her age. While Boothright searches for form by pushing paint around the canvas, Boon’s construction of form feels more considered, shapes and colour are suspended across the temporal planes of painting. If Boothright finds a tangible depth that reaches forward, towards us, Boon searches for a surrealist, metaphorical depth that sinks backwards into the wall.
By working predominantly in large scale abstraction, both artists are resisting the contemporary bombardment of images and constant stimulation of today. The works become an aesthetic antithesis to the oversaturated artificiality of now, but they also battle with our contemporary understanding of time. Painting, in particular abstraction, exists on some other plane of time.This bravery in battling against the expected is what gives their work its urgency, its ability to translate emotion to the canvas so immediately in a world where emotions are pictorially buried under layers of meaning and divergence.
When the end of the world looms over younger generations of artists, for what, or why, do we keep painting? There is no longer the necessity of painting to preserve, to document an understanding of humanity for later generations. There is only a feeling of construction for destruction. This anger and directness is what we are hanging on our walls. We are exalting what it means to be a painter born in the millennium.
People often ask us where and how we find our artists. Sometimes the answer is simple: they just walk through the door.
- Ocki Magill and Billy Parker of Blue Shop Galleries
CHARLIE BOOTHRIGHT
Charlie Boothright (b. 2001) is an artist based in South London, who will graduate from Camberwell College of Arts, Fine Art Painting in 2023. She predominantly paints on large scale canvases that explore ideas of movement and dynamism through the tactility of materials.
"Within my paintings I am constantly searching for more questions. I am engaged in a process involving myself as an artist and the materials that allow me to visualise my internal states through large scale abstract paintings. I believe an extension of the artist can be seen through the work they make, as personally I create as an outlet for expression. This body of paintings follow the past two years of investigating my identity as a painter.”
ARCHIE BOON
Archie Boon (b. 2000) is an artist currently based in South London, and studies Fine Art Painting at Camberwell College of Art. Having grown up in the town of Saffron Walden whose pastoral and bucolic environs have provided the inspiration for many of his paintings, Boon closely abstracts the natural landscape with an increasingly muted colour palette and dynamism in his brush strokes.
“My current body of work has seen a massive reduction in colour and representational forms and has in turn become an outlet for recording feelings responding to a period or place. My works aim to show a trace of humanity, and act as evidence of time/work/process that has been rendered onto canvas. The work has become more introspective; getting information down onto the surface of the painting through large amounts of paint carving out the surface of my thoughts. This body of work has been made in response to my last show “Windmill Hill”.
Photographed by OLIVER WADE
Oliver Wade (b. 2002) is an English/Australian photographer currently completing his final year at Camberwell College of Arts. Within his practice, Wade strikes a balance between a semi-autobiographical diaristic documentation of his surrounding world, and portraiture of his peers, fellow artists and creatives. As such, Wade has been a constant figure for Boon and Boothright during their careers at Camberwell having documented their friendship, individual approach to mark-making, and their process/progress as contemporaries at Camberwell. Within his portraiture Wade strives to capture a sense of intimacy and a unique insight into the subject’s own world of creation. Seeking inspiration in the style of mid-twentieth century photographers, as well as applying analogue processes and approaches, allows Wade’s work to emphasise themes of familiarity, tactility and timelessness within his practice.
ARTISTS TALK
3pm Saturday 18th February
We are hosting an artists talk with Charlie Boothright and Archie Boon
at Blue Shop Gallery 3pm Saturday 18th February please arrive for 2.30pm
for a pre-talk beer, 30 places available. RSVP essential hello@blueshopcottage.com.