Miranda Boulton is a contemporary British painter working in London. She studied Art History at Sheffield Hallam University and at Turps Banana Art School, London. She is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.
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 & 2019, Creekside Open 2019, Two-person Exhibition ‘Double Time’ at Arthouse1 2019, ING Discerning Eye 2021 & 2023 and the Young Masters Autumn Exhibition 2022 & 2023. She is a member of Contemporary British Painting.
Artist Statement
Boulton is fascinated by Flower Paintings from Art History. She re imagines a genre once seen as superficial, feminine and slight. 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.
An interest in the passing of time is central to Boulton’s work. Flowers remind us of the fleeting, transient nature of life. She thinks of painting as a time based medium, layers of paint are like timelines on a tree, each holding memories of brush marks and integral to the finished piece.
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.
‘These works are saturated with thinking about the genre and its canonical practitioners, and never just in the mode of reference, or of establishing herself within a lineage. Boulton treats artists of the past as living resources to push against and experiment with, as interlocutors and channels of intimacy. The constellations guiding her work are many. Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) recur alongside Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), Mary Moser (1744-1819), Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) and Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), to name but a few. By recalling these artists together, their references threading from one work to the next, Boulton creates an imagined cohort of artistic ancestors, and raises questions pertinent to feminist art history. Why is it that when male artists painted still life it was considered profound – in Morandi’s case, almost spiritually so – but when women engaged with the same subject matter they were judged narrow, minor, even amateur? In Boulton’s spirited conversations with tradition, which treat all her chosen artists as equally valuable source material, these gendered distinctions melt away. Boulton’s process ensures these influences never become overbearing.’
‘Flowers are stripped of their associations with conventional femininity, what for centuries connected the ornamental function and essential frailty of flowers with women’s bodies. Instead, these flowers are elastic, energetic and robust. Distortion strategies explode conventional verisimilitude, and produce stretched and melted bouquets, which threaten to engulf the entire canvas.’
Acts of Cross-Pollination: Miranda Boulton’s Still Life by Rebecca Birrell
Click here to listen to Miranda’s Podcast Interview with ‘A Geography of Colour’