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Scott's origins are complex. The son of a Scottish
mother and an Irish house painter, he was born in Scotland. As a
child he moved with his family to Belfast and after studying art
there, he relocated to London, where he attended the RA Schools.
It was here that he first studied sculpture and subsequently, painting.
His early artistic personality was influenced and shaped by many
sources, including continental Modernism in the form of Matisse,
Picasso and Modigliani, and by new painting emerging from the USA.
This cocktail of influences also included some peculiarly personal
encounters, such as the naive imagery of Alfred Wallis and the over-arching
influence of British Modernist art theory, in the form of Roger
Fry and Clive Bell. These influences all appear to have left some
trace upon his creative trajectory.
To most people familiar with 20th century British
painting, Scott's name will bring to mind a domestic still life;
frying pans, mugs, fish and vegetables, rendered in a highly abstracted
manner and set down in broad areas of resonant colour. Although
the subject matter is identifiable, the forms are often simplified
and schematic, providing no more than a convenient motif upon which
to hang an examination of light, colour, form and pigment. Scott
also produced a substantial number of paintings which could be described
as uncompromisingly abstract, in the sense that no objective stimulus
can be identified. Perhaps a benefit of those abstracted works,
in which the motif is still discernible, is that they shut off the
possibility, and the risk, of completely irrelevant and misleading
interpretations - the spectator can immediately set aside the issue
of representation and attend to the real subject of the picture:
colour, form and texture.
His occasional treatment of the female nude often
brings a powerful, subjective charge to his painting, which is absent
(and probably avoided) in most of his other work. His nudes hint
at a suppressed eroticism, often reinforced by a more intense chromatic
range of fierce reds and icy blues.
Norbert Lynton's book is thorough, sensitive and scholarly;
a fitting literary monument to this powerful and influential painter.
The quality of printing and reproduction is excellent, with gratifyingly
few examples of the artist's work spread over a double page - a
defect which blights many otherwise excellent publications.
Clive Ashwin
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