Helen Booth is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in Llandysul in south west Wales, and exhibits throughout the UK. She studied at Wimbledon School of Art under George Blacklock, Prunella Clough and Bernard Cohen. In 1989 Helen graduated in Fine Art Painting.
In 2018 Helen underwent major surgery which unleashed an increased obsession with Life and Death within her creative practice. The painter's visit to Iceland in early 2019 was fundamental to her development as an artist. Upon witnessing the harsh, brutal and monochrome landscapes, it felt like a rebirth: "At times I stood in the landscape snow-blind, yet these moments gave me clarity of purpose. I sketched when the blizzards cleared; the miraculous imagery gave me a renewed vigour and revealed the way for me to develop my painting".
In 2019 Helen received two prestigious awards from the USA: the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award and one of twelve International Abstract Painting Awards from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. This generous support has been vital in her development as a painter. Other awards include the Threadneedle Art Prize at The Mall Galleries, London (2012), Jackson Pollock & Lee Krasner Foundation Award for Painting (2014) and the Glynn Vivian Prize at the BEEP International Painting Biennial Prize, Swansea (2018).
The Hafnarborg Arts & Culture Centre in Iceland awarded her Artist in Residence for March 2020 to further explore and develop her work in response to the Icelandic landscape. There Helen filled sketchbooks with drawings, took endless photographs and made copious notes about colour and textures.
Helen Booth strives to capture the human condition within her work, simultaneously considering deeply personal and universal themes such as Memory, Love, Life and Death. The surfaces of her paintings are akin to the landscape of Iceland with their reductionist aesthetics. Booth has distilled her ideas to create a sophisticated and moving body of work using a restrained palette to create stark, abstract visions that draw on a personal obsession with some of life's biggest questions.