Joe Bootham

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Joe Bootham (1911-1986) was a New Zealand painter. Born in England, Bootham, a sometime member of the Bolton Art Circle, Burnley Modern Art Group and The Independents, arrived in New Zealand in 1961. Among his sketches of passengers on the ship was one of Peter McLeavey, who subsequently became a well-konwn dealer of contemporary New Zealand art works. Bootham took up residency in Wanganui where he became a frequent exhibitor with the Wanganui Art Society. He also taught at Society meetings. Rejection for exhibition of his painting The Day I Rode the Blue Bull Through China provoked some controversy in local art circles.

In 1966, when visiting New Plymouth, he met New Zealand regionalist painter Michael Smither and began a continuing friendship that was artistically stimulating and rewarding.

From the mid-1960s until about 1970 he rented an old farm house in the Longacre Valley on the outskirts of Wanganui for use as a weekend retreat and studio. He responded to the New Zealand light and contour of the land and independently evolved a clear-edged style. During this period he produced a particularly distinctive group of paintings and drawings.

Bootham's ability to capture the unique light and landscape characterisitics of a particular country is a skill also revealed in his paintings done in England, Scotland, Australia, and North Africa and Palestine (when posted there 1945-47 with the Royal Signals). After a heart attack in 1969, his health did not allow him to engage as directly with the natural world as he had hitherto. Now more studio-bound he became experimental in his treatment of subject matter. In 1973 he developed his concept of merging subject matter with light, which culminated in a number of visionary watercolours, such as: Daybreak Over the Falls, the series That Indwelt With Light, and Woodland.

In 1973 he moved to Castlecliff on the outskirts of Wanganui, whichresulted in increased physical and mental isolation. His art work became more reliant on past experiences and the inner life. His art of this period was influenced by his interest in myth, religion, history, memory, time and space, psychology (general and autobiographical), and philosophy. In 1979 he finished the last of five oils known as the Quest Series.

He ceased painting in 1982 due to deteriorating health. His last works are drawings of a Coromandel river, done while on holiday.