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Abstract

A painter from Angel is showing a series of “uplifting” paintings at the Portland Gallery this month, including several depicting a busy Camden Passage on a summer’s day.

Nick Botting is exhibiting works through February, including Mount Street on the Hottest Day, The Italian in Bond Street and The Clothes Market, Camden at the gallery in St James’s.

“You could sit alone in a room with a Botting and feel like you had enough company to last you through the cold winter,” says the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Paintings of Life.

“He encapsulates the hints of the glamorous lifestyle we would all love to lead.”

Mr Botting loves to paint “en plein air”. He has been known to set up his easel at middle of an intersection or the roof of a car and once carried a full length mirror out into the Australian desert to paint a self-portrait.

He said: “Some painters work from photographs but for me it’s about being involved in the world around me.

“Being there, seeing people come and go, how they act and their idiosyncrasies.

“Then it becomes a matter of mood. I fancied doing an uplifting series of pictures, highlighting the more positive aspects of the world.

“But then you tend to strip out the things that make it authentic and make it London, like signposts and bits of rubbish, and then it starts to look like Christmas day.

“But those peripheral things give it an authenticity and I’m interested in the ways one incorporates those. There are different ways to deal with authenticity and guiding a mood.”

Of one of the Camden Passage works, he said: “In the painting the girl is trying on clothes. Repeatedly I saw the same action of woman holding up a dress, or sort of laying it on her leg and looking in the mirror. It’s universally the same gesture and it was oddly intimate in a public place.

“I loved that observation. You get that only when you sit there all day and I think it’s terribly important to do that.”