The Swimmer by Nick Botting

WORKING from a specially built paint box and easel, artist Nick Botting is not confined to a studio: he paints directly from life. The Islington-based artist creates figurative scenes and portraits that reflect the world he sees – it means getting out and up close to the topics he loves to capture.

In a new show at the Portland Gallery in St James’s, Piccadilly, Nick’s eye has created images ranging from the Barbican to Venice, and Parliament Hill to the English coast.

“I paint very much from life and always have,” he reflects. “This started with drawing in the life room and realising what a different deal it is to work directly from people, rather than the dislocation that comes from copying photos.”

Nick studied art history at the University of Kent and his art has taken him around the world. Previous projects have seen him work on sports scenes – cricket scenes include Ashes tours that now hang in Lord’s – and a triptych commissioned to mark the opening of the new Wembley stadium in 2007. This he did from the terraces during the FA Cup Final.

He finds inspiration in early painters who did not have the privilege of photographic technology. “I looked at painters like Corot for landscape and Rembrandt for his beautifully observed pen and ink drawings of figures in the street,” he says.

And in today’s digital world, this offers a fresh perspective.

“I think people are realising the importance of actual engagement now, given that they spend so much time one step removed from reality,” he explains.

“I enjoy watching people together, trying to see how they interact and how that reminds me of my own behaviour. For a painter of my type, the presence of figures changes a composition completely, so that, for example, a painting can be given a diagonal movement by having a figure walking through it, or leaning to pass something.”

Nick Botting

Nick has a specially constructed mobile paint set the size of a briefcase that holds his materials and a painting up to 24 inches wide. He has used it for three decades and likens it to a laptop.

“I have learnt never to ask permission in a pub or restaurant – if you ask you are giving that person responsibility for anything that could go wrong. It never has, but they don’t know that. I learnt years ago that you just have to sit down and start something – usually just a pencil sketch, and from that always comes the kernel of an idea – it could be about structure or composition or something about people like calmness or isolation or affection, and then I start to elaborate on that idea.

“For years I was self-conscious about sitting in a bar with my oil paint laptop, nursing a coffee or two while I worked, and now of course, everyone is sitting there with a laptop.”

Built by a cabinet-making friend, it means he can take his work wherever he goes. This impacts on the topics he chooses.

“I like to paint in bars and restaurants because there are endless possibilities, like a game of chess, as to how it can work,” he says.

“In the Barbican café I will change and adjust figures as they come and go, trying to balance them to echo the mood.

“There is a bustle in the late morning which is different to the quiet a little earlier, or in the afternoon there’s a lull which carries a calm with it. I like how people settle in after a while of being in a place, so that they project a very different mood the longer they stay.”

While the Barbican is on his doorstep – he lives in the Angel – his work relies on plenty of further travel.

The Barbican piazza, summer

“I have painted all over the world, St Petersburg to Havana, and have learnt a lot about different light across the world, but I live in the Angel and know London best,” he says.

“I have grown to love the Barbican and I love that it’s built on the oldest part of London, has Roman walls sticking out of the ground, was burnt to the ground, rebuilt, bombed and rebuilt again in such a fantastically ambitious and confident way. I like to be within the busy London streets and then to be far away from them, which echoes Londoners’ typical life of escaping to the coast.

“I have painted in the Australian outback to experience absolutely nothing to be seen in any direction. I love to go to the National Gallery early in the morning – where better to look at some of the best paintings in the world? Other collections: The Wallace Collection or Kenwood House hold beautiful paintings by Guardi, who could really sense atmosphere, Richard Parkes Bonington, who could paint the finest calm sky. Then I like more raw painters like Jack Yeats who painted people in a loose rough way – I like this because there is an authentic engagement and an immediate response that feels like it has integrity, that it’s felt there and then.

“When I paint I try to carry the experience of decades of observing and drawing figures, balance that with an understanding of colour and people like Corot or Guardi or Manet, then just lose myself in the day.”

The Barbican interior, winter

His daughter has been at school in the Barbican for the past nine years so he knows it well, and has enjoyed learning about the design of the Brutalist complex. “I went on an architectural tour and was amazed to learn it was designed with an Italian Piazza in mind, with water, a grand lakeside terrace, columns and fountains. I love the futuristic ambition of it – and its space and quiet. There is a sense of making something to last and keeping it going rather than knocking it down as happens to so much of our architecture. To paint it is a challenge as there is such a strong linear structure that doesn’t work with my freehand way of working, so I had to find a way of painting just enough precise structure without overburdening the image.”

And in contrast to the work that focuses on the life of the Barbican, Nick includes plenty of seascapes. The coast and sea create something that feels timeless and offers a contrast to the fleeting characters he includes.

“I think about us here now, and in turn the value of things that stay longer than us – things that don’t ever change like the sea and breaking waves and tides. I like the way people turn to the sea for some understanding, how they walk by it, stare at it, swim in it. Within the endless span of time that the sea encompasses, I love the moment that is now, and I tried to paint that particularly in The Swimmer – a figure in the moment or two of lowering herself into the water.”

• Nick Botting – Barbican, Venice and the Sea runs from November 12-28 at the Portland Gallery, 3 Bennet Street, St James’s, SW1A 1RP. See: https://portlandgallery.com/