THE SIT DOWN
12: ARTHUR BOOTHBY
Trained in painting at Camberwell College of Arts and later at the Royal Drawing School, Boothby has developed a body of work spanning drawing and painting, inspired by a range of interests from archaeology and neuroscience to Jungian dream theory. The underlying concern, though, is singular: the strangeness of being a self in a world you are simultaneously creating and subject to. We are products of the world, shaped by it entirely, and yet in subjective experience, we are also the ones generating it — observing it from the inside of something we can never quite see whole. His work doesn't seek to resolve that contradiction.
Motifs recur without fully declaring themselves. An arrow appears across paintings — pointing somewhere, or nowhere in particular, an empty sign that accumulates meaning the less it explains itself. Snoopy surfaces too: a figure universally recognisable that it becomes a kind of blank, a stand-in for the self without the weight of self-portraiture. Boothby didn't arrive at these images through deliberate planning, and that's consistent with the logic of his practice. If you already know what something means, there's little reason to paint it. The image earns its place precisely where certainty runs out.
Growing up in the English countryside has stayed with him, even if the London art world has little appetite for landscape as a serious subject. He works across several paintings at once, moves between them restlessly, and follows a short attention span as a method rather than a limitation. The work accumulates not through sustained focus on any single idea, but through the slow collision of many — dreams, diagrams, wordplay, archaeological residue, the fear of being and the equal fear of not being.
What emerges is a practice built around incompleteness, around signs that point without arriving, and feelings that resist being named. Boothby is less interested in answering questions than in finding images that keep them open.