| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | “I paint to […] lay bare the energy of my time.” This is how Robert Scott – a highly regarded senior Western Canadian abstract artist – has described his practice. He has contributed to the Edmonton visual arts community as an artist, teacher and mentor since 1971. He earned a Diploma in Applied Art from the Alberta College of Art, Calgary, in 1969. After working in relative isolation, he attended a workshop given in Edmonton in 1973 by the American sculptor Michael Steiner, and met a community of fellow artists interested in modernist abstraction. He later earned an MVA from the University of Alberta in 1976, where he worked as an instructor until 1991. He has also been invited as both guest and lecturer to the Emma Lake workshops (Saskatchewan); to the Triangle Artists Workshops in New York and Spain, and to the Thupelo Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, sharing his expertise with communities with no formal artistic outlet.
His extensive travels have inspired his work, both through contact with the art of the past, and through sensual stimuli which he channels into his artworks. He is best known for his large-scale, emotionally-charged paintings that combine exuberant colours in acrylic pigments with heavy incrustations of impasto. The use of his hands to apply the paint allows him direct contact with his materials, as he responds to the feel, even to the sound, of the paint as he moves it over the canvas. He has also sprayed glazed veils of varying colours on different sides of the paint crests, creating an undulation or refraction of the light as the viewer changes position. These shifting colours draw on Monet’s studies of light at different times of day. Scott has also added calligraphic markings to his works, inspired by the vital energy of Chinese characters.
Scott had his first solo exhibit at the then-Edmonton Art Gallery in 1978; over the years he exhibited regularly at Edmonton’s Douglas Udell Gallery. He holds shows at his own studio in Edmonton, as well as at the Scott Centre in his other hometown, in Cadillac, Saskatchewan. He has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally, and has received various travel awards, as well as a designation by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He has also received accolades from the New York art critic, Clement Greenberg, amongst others.
In a 2015 exhibit, Copper Slag, held at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery, his newly pared-down works forgo colour, impasto and even paint, as he draws with copper slag, used like a powdered pigment, and unconventional non-art tools. This may hark back to the mark-making of the pre-lingual societies of cave painters. In an era when many artists have left modernist abstraction behind, Robert Scott continues to energize, invent and evolve the genre.
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