Miranda Boulton
Boulton is fascinated by Flower Paintings from Art History. She re imagines a genre once seen as superficial, feminine and slight. Flowers make sense to her, they cover the monumental and the everyday, alive, beautiful, decaying, dying, haunting, life affirming, poignant, reassuring, always at the height of their beauty they fade away.
Circling around this genres history, she spends time absorbing artists and their work, following their brushstrokes as if listening in on a conversation. Boulton has spent time working with memories of paintings by Winifred Nicholson, Edouard Manet, Rachel Ruysch, Mary Moser, Giorgio Morandi, Chaim Soutine, Suzanne Valadon and Dorothea Tanning to name a few. She starts working from memories of a specific painting directly onto the canvas, her desire to respond to the original memory is eventually abandoned as other memories surface and blend together, moving fluidly allowing for unexpected outcomes. Intuition and spontaneity take over and the work writes its own narrative in the layers of paint and marks.
Her paintings are bold, natural imagery collides with an intuitive emotional response to mark making. Colours slip and slide around the surface, large sweeping gestures made by hand or brush sit next to layers of impasto paint and carefully painted details. Areas of soft powdery spray paint collide with hard built-up impasto oil paint. The canvas is turned to destabilise and shift the composition, giving fresh perspective, the line between figuration and abstraction is traversed.
Boulton’s paintings are meditations on the history of art, but they are also alive to more urgent, emotional questions surrounding perception and existence itself.
Miranda Boulton is a painter working between Cambridge and London. She studied Art History at Sheffield Hallam University and at Turps Banana Art School in London. In 2021 she won the Jacksons Painting Prize and exhibited in ‘Staged Nature’ at Glyndebourne Opera House in 2023.
Notable exhibitions include: RA Summer Exhibition 2016 and 2019, two person exhibition ‘Double Time’ at Arthouse1, Creekside Open 2019, Young Masters Autumn Exhibition 2022 and 2023 and ING Discerning Eye 2021 and 2023. She is represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.