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.
PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
I’d say my influences are pretty varied but one quote from guston quote I think of a lot is, “probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.” Otherwise the short story, “The Eye,” by Nabokov and its allusions to the divided self is one that always sits in the back of my mind. Artists I like: Freud, Matt Bolinger, Manet, Morteza Khakshoor, Alice Neel. Thomas Nagel “the absurd.” Augury.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
Most works start with drawing. Drawing from the world, drawing friends, drawing things I see, drawing diagrams, drawing from the internet a lot. Compositions for paintings often come to me in the moments before sleep when I let my mind wander and latch onto ideas. Often they come entire and sometimes in part, from there I try to reconfigure the drawings I have or make more drawings to fit the image in my mind.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
It changes from work to work, but the main feeling I guess is the feeling of dissonance between being a part of the world, a product of it, fully ingrained within its mesh, and being apart from it: separated by the film of consciousness. What lets me experience the world is what separated me from it. I also am interested in the world as an infinitely interpretable web of meaning of which one can you experience only the surface.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
Philip Guston for sure