Artist's Statement
Painters are bound to be involved in painting. It follows then that after a certain number of years spent following studio life, this painter realizes that the old and the new in painting have always been only one thing. This being the case, being anti-traditional turns out to be just as corny as being traditional. What remains is that other thing that is not there, that thing which painters love and love searching for.
In this search, history becomes a matter of eclectic affinities, and everything becomes simultaneous in the present moment. It is as if space might replace time and one can become properly lost. Lost in space. Profound memories of works of art blend with personal affective memories, with now my work, as with my whole life.
Sam Scott
Artist's Statement:
New Paintings, March 2010
For many years now I have been struggling to find a way to speak to the opposing energies which we experience as human beings in living and witnessing life. One the one hand, there is such beauty, meaning, and grandeur in nature-and such meaning in the experience of love and friendship. That sense of Sacrament which clothes Jungs Creatura, that experience of meaning and beauty we discover from time to time.
On the other hand, there exist those forces of suffering, madness, evil, obscenity, cruelty, the face of Creator, the Prime Mover, The Fundamental Ground of Being, turned away. How to express these opposing forces in the arena of a painting? How to reconcile this dialectic of context? What is that pattern which connects and reveals itself through time? How do we dare to express that sense of unity which is the secret at the heart of all creation?
The answer was there all the time-it has been with us always-the vertical and the horizontal, heaven and earth. the warp and the woof, the eternal dialectic. For me, the breakthrough came in France last October, with the realization that I had to seize and possess this idea by owning it with deep passion and belief, to take to this human breast the desire to unify and thereby to sanctify the total natural world of which we are. To praise that ultimate unity which is aesthetic. The Albatross and the Symphony, The Fra Angelico, the 29th Sonnet.
Yes, we remember the Ancient Mariner's sea snakes. He "blessed them, unaware", and the albatross then fell from his neck into the sea. That relation between consciousness and beauty, and the relation between beauty and the sacred. And finally that relation between the sacred and consciousness. Thinking about thinking. And then making a painting. The new old man's way. As always.
Sam Scott
