Roberta Booth

About Roberta Booth

Reflections on Arcturus [1997]
Oil on canvas, 91 x 152 cms
Donated by the artist 2002.

Reflections on Arcturus, is from a large body of work that refers to the paths of mysticism; the artist has used Arcturus as a metaphor for the transformation of consciousness and the reflective path of enlightenment. The ancients believed that Arcturus was the home of the shepherding focus of knowledge and the first threshold beyond our level of consciousness.

In all her work she asks the onlooker to take a personal journey; through the contemplation of the paintings to find their own story revealed through the images, metaphors and symbols, so her art becomes a sacred journey for artist and observer. Recently Roberta Booth wrote, "In the face of modernism, which to me seems to only have contempt for anything that isn't shocking, stark or visceral, viewing life as meaningless and the people as destructive of themselves and the environment, I have become a journeywoman of the inner realms, learning to fly into the eternal, where every moment is burgeoning with light and significance. My art is the fruit of this journey, bringing the mysteries back to the market place for others to share.

A Gate in the Heart of Love [2001]
8-colour lithograph with hand-painted gold leaf, 25/75, 61.5 x 40 cms
Donated by the artist 2002

In a Gate in the Heart of Love, the lower halves of the embracing lovers, who have set aside their lute, paintbrush and the book of mystic law, carry the Sanskrit words 'om shanti', divine peace, overseen by the mediating Buddha behind a blaze of lotus-flamed night lights.

"The imagery of my pictures symbolises the external, inseparable interconnection between the human, the natural and the sacred. I believe that art needs to reclaim its place; to pull itself out of contemporary confusion and become part of life as it is lived every day, and as a means of the individuals experience. I see art as a way of transforming the everyday into something sacred".

Of a recent one-woman exhibition of works in London 2008, Professor Michael Tucker said, "whether a matter of alchemy or religion, natural spiritual capacity or artistic intuition, it is a mystery embedded deep in the poetic of these new works by Roberta Booth: some of the most original, and yet trans-personal paintings of recent times".

The late Professor Norbert Lynton, one of Booth's strongest champions spoke of her "distinctiveness and amazing generosity". "I admire the upfrontness of her idiom, at one pop and cultured and also her technical mastery. There is no one else who speaks of the sensory and spiritual with such vigour".