Painting Abstractions With Spontaneity and Speed

---

To create her lyrical abstract paintings, Filomena de Andrade Booth uses experimentation and an ever-changing, often improvisational process.

by Maria Seda-Reeder

Back in the mid-60s, Filomena de Andrade Booth’s goal was to attend the local New Jersey State College to become a Spanish-language teacher. Born in Portugal, Booth immigrated to the United States with her family , and Portuguese was spoken in their home along with English. She felt confident she’d be accepted into the teaching program. Still, she followed a gut instinct and also applied for art classes at what is now known as Kean University, formerly Newark State College.

Booth was accepted to Kean, where she began art classes. “I absolutely loved it there,” Booth recalls. “There are times in your life when you have to trust your instincts.” That willingness to follow her instincts put her on the path toward a lifelong passion for art. Her expressionist abstract paintings demonstrate the artist’s willingness to trust her gut and to follow her intuition, combined with her penchant for experimentation with the medium.

Following Plan B

Booth graduated from Kean University in 1969 with a B.A. in Art Education, and taught high-school art classes for nearly a decade. “As a teacher, I learned how to use and work with a variety of materials and media,” Booth recalls. “I did copper enameling, watercolor and crafts. Working in it all helped me develop an ability to be versatile in my work,” she says.

Though she mastered many techniques, teaching exhausted her creatively, she says. She chose to stay home and raise her three sons until a move to Pinellas County, Florida. There Booth began painting again to cover the 15-foot walls in her new home. When a worker from the subdivision she’d moved into inquired about the artist, her path forward became clear. She showed her work to the designers for the showroom homes, and the art consultant there bought everything Booth had.

“That’s when I realized I could sell my art,” she says. She worked with that consultant and other interior designers for a decade, moving from commissions for residential clients to creating works for large hotel chains, corporate offices and private yachts.

An Ever-Changing Process

Booth embraces an intuitive painting approach in her artwork. “A lot is accidental — serendipitous,” she says of the impasto-like textures she builds up and then scrapes off her canvas using acrylic paints and mediums. Before putting color on the canvas, Booth mixes gel medium into gesso and primes her surface with the mixture. She continues to manipulate the surface treatment using palette knives, a hair pick and other unconventional tools.

Then she might apply a wash of color to the primed canvas using watered-down acrylic paint applied with a natural sponge in wide strokes. Or, she may choose a completely different approach. “As far as technique goes, every painting I create is different,” Booth says. “I just start putting paint on the surface, working and reworking it.”

Suited for Speed with Acrylics

Booth prefers to work quickly, and acrylics, with their fast-drying time, lend themselves to her approach. “Modern acrylics have come a long way since I was in college,” the artist declares. The versatility of acrylics appeals to Booth. “They’ve done so much with acrylics; you can use them like oils or mimic watercolor. I love that with acrylics I just have to wash my hands.”

Booth uses Golden and Liquitex products for most of her work. Golden products in particular seems fitting since Golden marketed the first acrylic paints in the 1940s. The Golden store in Manhattan was a hangout for Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, whose work Booth seems visually and conceptually aligned with. Booth enjoys getting to play with her medium, and she admits to being obsessed with art supplies. “I pull out colors, and experiment and play with them until I achieve a result that I’m happy with.”

While Booth has cultivated an abstract expressionist style throughout her career, her work shines when she walks the line between abstraction and representation. Booth captures natural subjects such as landscapes and animals. Seen through her artistic vision, though, horizon lines are implied and scenery details become blurred. She applies concise, soft tonal palettes with darker contrasting colors to representational details, conveying only the necessary features.

Handling the Business Details

After a move to Texas for her husband’s job in the early 2000s, Booth began to research using the Internet as a marketing tool to get her art in front of potential customers and collectors.

Booth sold her work on eBay from 2002-2004 until the online site changed how they showed art. She sought out other online avenues, and by 2004 started selling her work through sites such as artfulhome.com and her own website. “I prefer to sell online because it gives me more control over everything,” Booth admits.

She’s a successful, one-woman outfit, handling all of her social-media outlets, writing her own e-newsletter and facilitating shipping of works she sells. Asked if she spends a lot of time on self-promotion, Booth acknowledges, “You have to, because if you don’t do it nobody else will.”

No Mistakes in Art

The business side for an artist who intends to make money from her work is a necessity. Yet Booth confesses that the true joy, not surprisingly, is in the painting itself. “I usually start with no idea in mind, and as I work an idea develops. Then I follow that lead.” She doesn’t stop painting until “there’s nothing more that I can add,” she says. After that, though, she’ll even take a few more days to simply look at the piece to make sure she’s satisfied with it.

Knowing when the piece is finished is “an instinct,” Booth says. “I used to tell my students, “There are no mistakes in art. You can work with it, modify or change it, but there are no mistakes.”

---

Meet the Artist

Filomena de Andrade Booth was born in Portugal and grew up in New Jersey. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art from Newark State College, now known as Kean University, in New Jersey. She has taken graduate courses at Montclair State University in New Jersey and studied at the Dunedin Fine Art Center. Booth has taught workshops in Florida and Texas, and served as a juror for Art in the Square in Southlake, Texas. She currently resides near Waco, Texas, with her husband. She still teaches private workshops. To learn more, visit filomenabooth.com.

---

Maria Seda-Reeder is an art critic, freelance writer, curator and adjunct instructor at the University of Cincinnati.

A version of this article originally appeared in Acrylic Artist, Summer 2015.