Short Biography
Miranda Boulton (b. 1973) is a contemporary British painter who lives in Cambridge with a studio in London. She studied Art History at Sheffield Hallam University and at Turps Banana Art School in London.
Her work has been shown internationally at Art Miami (Miami Basel Week) and Expo Chicago, group shows include Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2016 & 2019), ING Discerning Eye (2019 & 2021), Young Masters Autumn Exhibition & Invitational at the Exhibitionist Hotel (2022-24), and ‘Staged Nature’, Glyndebourne (2023). In 2021 she won the Jacksons Painting Prize. She had her first solo exhibition ‘Ghosts and Flowers’ with Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London, October 2024.
She is a member of Contemporary British Painting and has paintings in many private collections in UK, Europe and USA.
Art Statement
Boulton’s practice expressively reinvigorates and reinterprets the genre of floral still life painting. She references and combines the traditions of Still Life painting and Abstraction within her mix of vigorous and delicate marks.
The Still Life genre reminds us of the transience of life and the fragility of nature. Her cut bouquets reflect mans manipulation of nature and hint at its consequences. Historically floral still life painting has been seen as the lowest genre, thought of as slight and feminine. Boulton explores, challenges and subverts these assumptions, viewing the genre as iconic and a powerful reflection of its time. She fuses traditional references with visceral raw gestural brushwork. She does not think of her paintings as gendered, her flowers have strength and muscle, they are untethered with backgrounds void of reference. She sees them as living organisms in a state of becoming, in their own orbits.
To start her process, Boulton works directly onto the canvas recalling memories of a specific historical floral painting. Painters such as Fantin Latour, Manet, Ruysch, Moser and Morandi have been studied, to name a few. Building from the instability of memory as opposed to directly referencing the historical work, her desire to respond to the original memory is eventually abandoned as references flow from one artist to the next, intuition and spontaneity take over, past and present collide and the work writes its own narrative in layers of paint. The finished paintings retain a feel of the original source in an oblique way, gently nudging association, hovering between abstraction and figuration.
Click here to listen to Miranda’s Podcast Interview: ‘A Geography of Colour’.
Graham Crowley talks about ‘Night Echoes II’.
‘Silent Disco 25’, curated by Graham Crowley, July 25.